


Folie a Deux

by lolcat202



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2018-12-26 04:24:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 50,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12051267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolcat202/pseuds/lolcat202
Summary: Eight years after abandoning her ballet career to care for her niece when her family is killed in a drunk driving crash, Laura Roslin comes face-to-face with her former partner (and former love) Bill Adama. Based on yet another Hallmark movie prompt from the oh-so-talented @okaynextcrisis.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [okaynextcrisis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaynextcrisis/gifts).



_December 24, 2008_

As the corps took the stage in their ornate purple and pink flower tutus, Laura tucked her head into her knees, rubbing her thighs under the thick leg warmers she’d layered over her tights. It was her second show of the day, and she could feel her muscles seizing up in protest.

At 27, she wasn’t exactly ancient by ballet standards, but her body was starting to rebel against her rigid rehearsal and performance schedule. And her feet…good Lord, her feet were so ugly and bumpy and calloused at this point that even in the dead of summer she didn’t dare wear flip-flops for fear of scarring small children for life.

 _Just a half hour more,_ she reminded herself. She tugged on the tips of her pointe shoes, flexing her feet to stretch her aching Achilles tendons, and begged the gods of dance to make it through this performance. Just one more half hour, and she’d have three glorious days off to spend with her parents and sisters and niece and ice packs and a tube of Tiger Balm. Just 30 minutes, and she’d get the break that she’d so desperately needed since mid-October. She was going to eat pizza tomorrow, and she wasn’t going to split her dessert with her six-year-old niece. Maybe she’d even drink a beer. Sodium and carbs be damned, she was going to enjoy herself, if she could just make it through the next 30 minutes.

“You gonna get off that floor, or do I need to drag you out on that stage by your hair?”

She looked over her shoulder, not quite willing to let go of the stretch she was holding, not even for Bill. He held out a hand to her, looking just as fresh and ready to perform as he was at their 11am call for the matinee. Bill, who never seemed to get tired, pulled her to her aching feet and straightened the bodice of her tutu. Bill, who on these grueling two-a-day performances, always knew when she needed stronger hands than her own to rub feeling back in her throbbing muscles. He turned her around and dug his thumbs into her lower back, laughing under his breath when she yelped a little at the pressure.

“I thought you were tougher than that, Roslin,” he said.

“I thought you were supposed to be sweet to me,” she fired back.

“I’m supposed to make you look good,” he reminded her. “Can’t do that if you don’t let me.”

He did make her look good, she knew that. He’d already been a star at ABT when she’d joined the company at 19, and even her relatively quick rise through the ranks wasn’t enough to catch his eye. And why would it, when he’d partnered the likes of Paloma Herrera in his first leading role? A soloist, even a soloist who was steadily earning more and more roles, wasn’t going to distract him, not when he was Romeo to Carolanne Baldwin’s Juliet. Onstage and off.

But ballet was neither a kind nor forgiving art, and even Carolanne wasn’t immune to the laws of physics. One misjudged landing out of a grand jete blew out her ACL and ended both her career and her relationship. Just like that, Bill needed a new partner for the William Forsyth showcase, and just like that, the three soloists that outranked Laura Roslin all managed to sustain some sort of injury or have a scheduling conflict. It wasn’t her talent or determination or work ethic; it was a mathematical absurdity that launched her into her first leading role.

She hadn’t been ready in those days. Eager to prove herself, burning to succeed, of course, but she hadn’t been ready, and it showed. She and Bill nearly came to blows in the wings during their first performance, and she’d asked him point-blank if he was going to try to replace her.

“I’m not trying to get you fired,” he’d hissed at her. “I’m trying to make you look good, so get your lazy ass onstage and let me do my job!”

The idea that she needed someone else to make her look good was enough to light a fire under her tutu’s butt ruffles, so she went onstage and gave what she still thought was the best performance of her life. They’d shaken hands begrudgingly at the end of the show and agreed that maybe working together wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to them.

 _And look at us now,_ she thought. Three years as a team, two years as friends, and one year as…as something so much more. His fingers glided up from the knots in her back to rest on her shoulders, and he leaned in to press a kiss on her neck.

“Just another half hour,” he whispered, “and then I’ve got all night to be sweet to you.”

Funny, her pointe shoes didn’t seem so tight anymore. She yanked off her leg warmers and took her spot in the upstage wing, ready to dance the Sugarplum Fairy variation and meet her cavalier onstage for the pas de deux.

30 minutes, two curtain calls, and a bouquet of roses later, the red velvet curtain finally dropped on the stage, and she was free.

The other dancers filed offstage to head back to the dressing rooms, but she plopped down where she stood and started tugging at the ribbons of her pointe shoes. She usually held onto her shoes to sign and give away (or to tuck in her niece’s bag when the family was packing up to go back to Philly), but the shanks had given out midway through the pas de deux, earning her two freshly bruised toenails and a cramp in her arch that showed no interest in subsiding. These demon shoes were going in the trash. Immediately.

She yanked the tape off her toes and balled it up inside the shoes, then curled and flexed her toes. Oh, sweet relief. She still had to get out of her costume, dig out the 24 bobby pins holding her massive head of hair in a bun, wipe off the thick layer of stage makeup, and face the stage-door crowd for autographs, but for just a moment, she was going to let her body breathe.

Three glorious days off with Bill and her family could wait another sixty seconds.

When she finally managed to push herself to her feet, stubbornly ignoring the cracks and pops her joints insisted on making, she realized that she wasn’t alone onstage anymore. Kevin, her boss, was leading Bill and two police officers out of the wings.

 _Huh,_ she thought. _Don’t see that in a theatre very often._ She gathered up her shoes and smiled her brightest performance smile at them, sidestepping them so that they could go about their business and she could go about her evening with her charming cavalier.

“Laura,” Kevin said, stopping her with a hand to her arm. “These gentlemen need to talk to you.”

***

_October 3, 2016_

Her mother’s famous white chicken chili was bubbling away on the stove, and the aroma of garlic, chili powder and browned onions was making Laura’s mouth water and mind wander. Even after eight years of sharing this house with Grace, being in the kitchen like this always made her think that her mother was just in the other room. She half expected to hear her mother’s voice calling out to Cheryl and Sandra that dinner was almost ready and reminding Laura to grab her leotards and tights out of the wash and hang them to dry.

These days, it was Laura who dug through a mountain of Lycra and nylon in the laundry basket every other day. Not hers, not anymore, but she still felt a tug every time she noticed a new run in her niece’s tights. She’d traded in waffle tights for yoga pants, and she didn’t regret it for one second. It meant that Grace had a home and what remained of family waiting for her when she got home from rehearsals. It meant that Laura was home at 5:00 every evening to cook dinner, clean up and check Grace’s homework.

She didn’t even regret it even when she stayed up later and later so that she wouldn’t have to think too much about sleeping alone in the room her parents had shared until the day they’d brought the family to see her dance in _The Nutcracker._

 _The Nutcracker,_ the bane of every dancer’s existence. She definitely didn’t regret not having to do that ballet again…This year, sweet blessed baby Jesus, Grace was in a snit because she was too old to play Clara in the Rock School’s annual performance, and too stubborn to see being cast as a snowflake as anything other than a downgrade, so she withdrew from the school’s production. It was the first time in a good 22 years that Laura wouldn’t be held hostage to _Nutcracker_ rehearsal schedules at the end of the year, and oh, she was so very grateful.

Logically, Laura knew that Grace got her ego and her stubbornness from her father – of all the Roslin sisters, Cheryl was always the most likely to roll with life’s punches. When Grace had stood in front of her, green eyes blazing with righteous fury, there was no denying she every inch Michael’s daughter.

Grace was Michael and Cheryl’s daughter, but in that moment, Laura saw the child she and Bill could have had, if things had been different. She had a brief flash of Bill Adama flat-out refusing in front of company class to dance the second night of _Sleeping Beauty,_ when he and his partner deserved the opening night. Kevin should have fired Bill on the spot and demoted Laura back to the corps, but they opened _Sleeping Beauty to rave reviews._

Grace should have gotten her snotty teenage ass handed to her by her teachers, but they’d merely suggested she use the time when she should be rehearsing to prepare for summer intensive auditions.

Laura didn’t regret her choices, but she sometimes wished she had half the guts Grace had when it came to fighting for what she wanted.

She heard the door slam as she was dusting a bit of chopped cilantro into the pot. She heard the telltale thump of books and dance bags being dropped on the floor, then two hollow thwacks against the wall as Grace kicked off her Uggs.

“In here,” she called out.

Her niece came barreling into the kitchen in socks, sliding across the linoleum and grabbing Laura’s waist to stop herself.

“Laura! Laura! LAURA! YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TODAY!” Grace grabbed her hands and tugged her around the kitchen in a staggering waltz, sending chili splatters flying from the wooden spoon she still clutched in her hand. Laura couldn’t help but laugh along with her niece as they collided against the table and chairs, spinning faster and faster until they collapsed in a giggling heap on the floor.

“What? What?” she asked as she tucked a flyaway back into Grace’s bun. “Justin Bieber show up and ask you to be in a music video? You discovered the secret formula for unbreakable shanks? You decided to quit ballet and become a rocket scientist?”

“Not yet, no, and not ever.” Grace threw her arms around her aunt’s neck. “Laura, Jack Cottle asked me to play Clara in the Pennsylvania Ballet’s _Nutcracker!_ Can you believe it? An actual, real, professional performance with an actual, real professional company!”

Laura’s smile froze on her face. Damn Jack to hell and back for doing this to her. She’d seen him twice since he took over PA Ballet – once when they came face-to-face over kale sprouts at Whole Foods, and once when he came to her yoga studio to try to talk her into mentoring his corps dancers. The last time she’d had an actual, honest-to-God conversation with him, it had been the morning company class the day that her world had ended, when he’d picked her up off of the floor after a spectacular wipe-out and reminded her that a good review didn’t mean shit if she fell flat on her ass the next night. Bill had always hated Jack, but until this moment, she’d never felt the same. Now, she’d gladly shove a sugarplum down his throat and watch him choke on it.

Another _Nutcracker_. Another three months of rehearsals and choreography and a mountain of tights and leg warmers and worn-out pointe shoes.

“We start rehearsals tomorrow, and Laura, he wants to meet with you. Says he remembers you fondly,” Grace adds with a twitch of an eyebrow.

Laura snorted at that. Jack Cottle may remember her, but fondly? The only things Jack was fond of were a pack of cigarettes and a scathing comeback. “Fondly? He told me once that my fat ankles got in the way of his dancing.”

Grace wrinkled her nose. “Who has fat ankles? That’s not even a thing.”

Oh, sweet, innocent child. Laura pulled her niece into her arms and kissed her forehead. “Baby, if you become a professional dancer, people will line up to tell you that your earlobes are fat. Just remember that.”

“Well,” Grace said, tugging on her earlobes, “apparently mine are still skinny enough to land me a role with a professional company in a professional production of _The Nutcracker,_. So buckle up, Auntie Laura, because we’re in for the ride of our lives!”

***

Those words came back to haunt her approximately eighteen hours later as she sat in the lobby of PA Ballet’s studios. She’d walked Grace into the building, helped her check in with the receptionist and find the dressing rooms and her rehearsal studio, then retreated to the lobby with a book and a cup of coffee. She was just at the point where the hardboiled cop realized that the sultry dame was more than a pretty face when she heard _that_ voice. The voice that woke her up in the middle of the night, the voice that echoed in her head when she chanted Namaste to her students. That voice that told her to take all the time she needed, that he’d be there waiting for her when she was ready.

“I’ll be ready in a minute,” Bill Adama said, standing not ten feet from where she had her nose in a book. She cast her eyes desperately around the room, looking for a cubby or a bench or desk to hide behind. Suffering through _Nutcracker_. rehearsals was one thing; suffering through Bill’s presence was another. What the _hell_ was he doing in Philadelphia? He was supposed to be in New York with his wife.

She was going to kill Jack, no doubt about it, but first, she had to hide from the ghost of her Christmas past. She scrambled over parents and children, diving into the corner of the room and holding her beat-up copy of _Blood Runs at Midnight_ over her face, trying to shield herself from Bill’s most unwelcome presence.

For a few seconds, the lobby was quiet, and she thought that she might have gotten away with hiding from him.

“Your elbows are still a little too bony,” he said, one finger tugging the book from her face. “I thought that you said that when you retired, you’d eat more.”

She tucked her bony elbows against her sides and called up her best performance face, a bit rusty, but still useful. Bill Adama was giving her that same challenging half-smile she’d seen the first day she put her hand in his in rehearsal. “I said a lot of things about when I retired,” she shrugged.

He remembered what she’d said, she could see it in the way his face fell the moment the words left her mouth. She’d said that they should get married, that they’d have babies, that they’d live happily ever after in a lakeside cabin in upstate New York where they’d trade tights for denim, curtain calls for mourning doves, and maybe grow their own vegetables.

She’d said a lot of things when she was 27, and now that she was 35 and washed up, she wished she could take them back. Judging by the sour look on his face, he echoed her sentiments. After all these years, she could hardly blame him. It was her decision to walk out of his life without a backward glance, and it was only fair that he held a grudge.

Still, what was she supposed to do? Grace needed her. Bill may have loved her, but he didn’t need her like Grace did. Six months after she’d retired, Carolanne had rehabbed her ACL enough to take on short-term roles with ABT, and it wasn’t another six months after Carolanne’s return to the stage that Karl had called her up to tell her that Bill and Carolanne were getting married.

Bill was in the past. He could stand in front of her and glower as much as he wanted, but he was as much history as bunions and bruised toenails.

He stared her down with the same blank expression he had when she ran out of gas in rehearsals, taking her back to the 24-year-old who knew she was in over her head. Back then, she’d tripped over her tongue to explain herself to him; now, she was a little older, and wiser, and she had responsibilities to the present, not the past.

“What do you want, Bill?” she asked softly.

He shrugged, refusing to meet her eyes. “Got a rehearsal. Some kid playing Clara. Jack thinks she has a lot of promise, so he called me.” He finally made eye contact, fixing his steely blue eyes on her, the same way he did when she whined about not having AC in their shitty Brooklyn walkup. “Why he thinks I’m a good judge of promise is beyond me, but I have a job to do.”

He turned and stalked down the hallway to the rehearsal studios, still moving with the tightly coiled grace that she’d fallen in love with long before she fell in love with the man.

“Make her look good,” she called out after him.

Eight years ago, he would have given her that half-smile and told her that making his ballerinas look good was his specialty. Here and now, he didn’t bother to respond. He just kept walking.

Years and miles had separated them, but she never felt farther away from Bill Adama than she did at that moment. She’d never felt farther away from Laura Rosin either.

***

Two things her dance career taught her: patience and discipline. Patience, because rehearsals, even for the stars, were always long and boring. Discipline, because the artistic director didn’t give a shit about her opinions, even when she was right. Patience kept her from climbing the walls while she waited for Grace to finish her three-hour rehearsal. Discipline kept her from slitting her wrists.

She read the same first paragraph over and over before she gave up and tucked the book back in her purse. Kate, Andrew and their unsolved murder would just have to wait until she had time to draw a hot bath and pour a glass of wine. To pass the time, she paced through the lobby, picking up flyers for classes and studying photos hanging on the wall of past performances. Some of the dancers she recognized – Jack had brought more than a few of her former co-workers to Pennsylvania.

She stood in front of a photo in the hallway, lost in thought. Guest artists Bill Adama as Albrecht and Carolanne Baldwin as Giselle, frozen in time in a heated embrace. Giselle, the one role she’d always wanted and never danced.

She was still staring at the photo when Grace came tearing down the hallway and launched herself into Laura’s arms, tears streaming down her face. “Baby, what is it?” Laura crooned, pulling her niece tighter into her embrace.

“He’s so…mean,” Grace sniffed, then launched into a fresh round of sobs.

Mean? Abrupt, maybe. Dismissive, certainly. Stubborn, to a fault. But mean? Bill Adama was never mean. Laura looked over her niece’s heaving shoulders to see a confused 14-year-old boy and an angry Bill Adama striding down the hallway.

“Grace, go get your bags and get changed,” she said. She rubbed Grace’s arms briskly, then pushed her in the direction of the dressing rooms. Once her niece disappeared behind the wooden door, she squared her shoulders and turned to face Bill.

“You need to-“ he started, but she cut him off with a jab to the chest.

“Listen, Bill. You may have a problem with me, and that’s fine. Maybe I deserve it, but take it out on me. She’s just a kid, and she has nothing to do with us.”

Bill took two steps back, trying to clear some space between his ribcage and her manicured nails. “You think this has to do with you? Lady, you have some sort of ego. At least now I see where she gets it.”

“Ego? She’s fourteen years old, for chrissakes!”

She could see the flush spreading across Bill’s face. He crossed his arms, the fluorescent lights above them glinting against the flat gold of his wedding ring. “She’s fourteen years old, and I’m 40. And she seems to think that she’s above taking corrections from someone who danced professionally for 17 years.” His voice dropped lower as he stepped back into her personal space, leaning into her so that she backed up. “You may not call that ego, but I sure as shit do. And I didn’t come here for this. I didn’t come here to have some self-important kid try to explain Balanchine to me, when the only reason she was cast in the first place is so that the artistic director could finally get YOU into his studio!”

They stood frozen, glaring at each other, until Bill’s words finally sank in. Without another word to him, she turned on her heel and stormed down the corridor, gunning straight for the administrative offices. She passed Grace in the waiting area and pointed to a chair. “Sit,” she barked. “Wait for me. I have to have a talk with your new boss.”

Laura the dancer would never have dreamed of barging in on the artistic director, but Laura the parent wasn’t going to let a little thing like professionalism stand in her way. She barreled past Jack’s assistant and yanked open the door marked Artistic Director.

“What the hell kind of game are you playing, Jack?”

He looked up from his desk and raised his eyebrows. Confronted with a five-foot-six ball of shaking rage, he merely shrugged and pointed to the chair opposite him. “Do you want to sit down, or are you just going to start throwing things?”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “I haven’t decided yet.”

Jack turned back to the rehearsal schedule on his desk, just as disinterested in her as he’d been eight years ago. “Well, when you do, let me know.”

If raising Grace had taught Laura anything, it was that it was damned near impossible to fight with someone who wouldn’t fight back. Feeling much like a petulant child, she slumped in the chair and took a deep breath.

“Jack, she’s just a kid. She thinks this is her first big break. I would have thought that you of all people would have more respect for the work a dancer puts into their art than to use a fourteen-year-old girl’s dreams to get what you want from her aunt.”

That caught his attention. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Bill. He told me the only reason you cast her was so that you could get me into the studio. I told you twice already, I’m not interested in working for you. I’m done with ballet. My only role here is to shuttle Grace back and forth to classes and rehearsals and that. Is. All.” she finished in clipped tones.

Jack leaned back in his chair, as uninterested by her temper now as he’d been eight years ago.. “Ahh, Bill said. Listen, Laura, I know it’s been a long time and you might not remember this, but Bill Adama says a lot of stupid things. Particularly when you’re involved.”

Something about his phrasing – that Bill and she were in any way involved, present tense – set her teeth on edge. “Why would he say that, if it weren’t true?”

“Well, I imagine he said it to piss you off, and it clearly worked. And I imagine he said it to get you to come in here and yell at me, so he’s two for two.”

“Bill shouldn’t be pushing my buttons. He shouldn’t even be here! He should be in New York with his wife and kids!” She dropped her head into her hands. “Dammit, Jack, what is he doing here?”

“That, young lady, is between Bill and me. But rest assured, I didn’t bring him here specifically to push your buttons, or to push his. He didn’t know you were going to be here. He didn’t even know who his Clara was until he walked into that studio today.”

Suddenly, it wasn’t hard to remember why Bill hated Jack so much back then. “Are you really that big of an asshole?” she asked him. “Why would you put him in that position? Not to mention me and Grace!”

He let out a long, slow exhale, and Laura could see by the tensing of his shoulders that his patience was running out. Quickly. “Let me let you in on a little secret, Miss Roslin. I am running a professional company here that has a reputation to uphold for quality, and I’m trying to put on the performance that will net this company over half of its annual income. I’m not sitting back here playing Machiavelli with your lives for kicks.” He leaned across the desk, meeting her eyes with a steady glare. “I hired your niece because she has potential to be a great dancer, just like you.”

“And Bill?”

He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his desk drawer and shook one out. He didn’t bother to light it, just tapped his fingers on his desk over an imaginary ashtray. “You were a great dancer, you know that? Technically, I mean. Fat ankles and all. Even when you were just an apprentice, you were as close to technically perfect as any dancer I’d ever seen. But when you started dancing with Bill…Laura, that’s when you became an artist. He helped bring that out in you. I thought he might do the same for her.”

“And it never occurred to you that he might not like that idea?”

“Of course it did,” he admitted with a smirk. “He wouldn’t even agree to come here until I promised him that you’d flat-out refused to have anything to do with this company.” Jack shrugged, just as disinterested in her life as he’d been when they shared a stage. “Not my fault he didn’t ask about your niece.”

God, the _ego_ on that man. “Listen, Jack, Grace is not me. She’s just a kid, and I can’t have her running out of rehearsals in tears because Bill Adama has his tights wedged up his ass.”

“Look, if you’re that worried about it, sit in on the rehearsals. Or pull her out of the show. Either way, I have a company to run, so figure out what you want to do and let me know. In the meantime, do you mind if I get back to doing my job?” He dropped the cigarette on his desk and pushed himself out of his chair, clearly dismissing her. “It was nice to see you again, Laura.”

She walked out of his office without a backward glance, promising herself that neither she nor Grace would ever set foot in the Pennsylvania Ballet building again.

***

Grace was quiet on the ride home. Usually full of chatter, she sat motionless in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed on the houses passing by as they drove through the familiar Philadelphia streets. Laura tried to get her to open up about what happened in rehearsal, but the teenager would only mutter that she didn’t want to talk about it.

It broke Laura’s heart to see Grace knocked so low by a bad rehearsal. The former professional dancer in her wanted to remind Grace that ballet wasn’t an easy path, and how she handled a bad day would go a long way to determining how she’d handle her career. The aunt wanted to pull her niece into her arms, kiss away the tears, and promise her that everything was going to be all right.

In the end, neither was the right answer, so she sent Grace up to her room with a sandwich and a mug of hot chocolate, and settled on the old, beat-up couch in the living room with a glass of wine.

Bill Adama. Him, of all people. Here, of all places. She thought she’d buried him along with the rest of her family, but just the sight of him was enough to rip open her old wounds and let the pain of losing almost everyone she loved drown her all over again.

__

She moved through the apartment on autopilot, pulling down suitcases and throwing in clothes in by the armful. Bill stood on the other side of the room, hands balled into fists at his sides, struggling to come up with the right words. “Laura-“ he started, but she cut him off with a shake of her head.

“No.” No what, she wasn’t sure. Maybe no, don’t stop me. Maybe no, don’t try to make this better. No, don’t tell me to sit down, because if I stop moving, I’m going to fall down and I won’t get back up again. “No, Bill.”

He knew her well enough to know when to leave it alone. “We’ll drive down first thing in the morning.”

“I’m going tonight. Grace needs me there now.”

He was behind her then, his fingers lacing through hers as he tried to still the shaking that hadn’t stopped since they’d left the theatre. “Laura, it’s after midnight. You’re exhausted. Get a few hours of sleep, and we’ll face this all tomorrow. Together.” He tightened his grip on her hands and pulled her back against him, wrapping their arms around her waist. “I’m here,” he whispered into her ear. “I’m right here.”

The tears started to fall, and he rocked her gently as she cried, gut-wrenching sobs that left her struggling to breathe. When her sobs finally started to slow, he pulled her down on the bed and tucked her into his arms. She rested her head on his chest, listening to his steady heartbeat and reveling in the rise and fall of his breathing.

Once his breathing had evened out into sleep, she gingerly removed himself from his arms and pushed herself off the bed. She zipped up the suitcases and tiptoed out of their bedroom, switching off the lights as she left. “I love you,” she whispered into the darkness.

Then she was gone.

She let the tears well up as she thought of the calls from Bill she didn’t answer as she sat by Grace’s side in the ICU, and of the call she finally returned after meeting with the director of the funeral home. She expected him to be furious that she’d snuck out in the middle of the night. She hadn’t expected his pitying tone of voice or the delicate way he spoke to her, like one wrong word would break her. She had to be strong for Grace, and she couldn’t do that if he was going to treat her like a fragile china doll. So she’d told him to stay in New York, to give her some time, to let her come back when she was ready. After the funeral, she’d changed her cell phone number.

She had no idea what he’d done with all the things she left behind in their apartment. In the weeks following the funeral, she was too absorbed in grief to care, and once Grace was released from the hospital and started rehab and physical therapy, she was too exhausted to think about it. Three months after the funeral, she came back to her parents’ house to find a package on the steps. When she opened it, she found all the photos she’d scattered around their apartment. Photos of the two of them, but also photos of her sisters and parents. Family vacations, Christmas mornings, graduations. Tucked into the box was a note. _I’m still here. Still waiting for you to come home._

Somewhere in the depths of her closet, that note still sat in a box full of photos. Somewhere in Philadelphia, Bill Adama was still furious with her for walking out on him, walking out on the home they’d built together.

She brushed away the tears and focused on her breathing, in and out, long and slow, the way she’d learned in yoga teacher training. She curled up into the sofa and tried to remind herself that home was here, in this house with faded wallpaper and creaking wooden steps and memories of her family. Home was four walls and a roof over their heads, not a deep voice and strong arms and a dry sense of humor that could always make her laugh, even when she wanted to kill him.

No matter how many times she told herself that, she still couldn’t quite make herself believe it.

***

She expected Grace to be sullen or angry when she came down for breakfast. Instead, Grace was twisting her hair in a bun, dressed for rehearsal and asking if Laura had seen her toe tape.

“It’s on the table in the hallway, where you left it,” she answered automatically. “Grace, what are you doing?”

Her niece shrugged. “Eating breakfast, I hope?” 

Still a little cautious, but her mouth was set in the same stubborn line Laura recognized from her mother, her sisters, and herself on more than one occasion. Grace dug through the cabinets to find a bowl for her cereal, frowning when she couldn’t find her favorite spoon.

“Dishwasher,” Laura said. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yes. I’m hungry.”

She chuckled in spite of herself. “Not that. Are you sure you still want to dance this part?”

“You always told me that talent wasn’t nearly as important as commitment. I committed to doing this, and I’m going to do it.” Stubborn, just like her aunt. “But I’m going to do it right,” she finished. Smart, just like her mother.

“Ahhh,” Laura replied. “And doing it right is?”

Grace pushed her cornflakes around the bowl. “Doing it right is listening to my teachers and learning from them. Even the bad ones.”

So some of the pearls of wisdom she’d been dropping over the past eight years had sunk in after all.

“If you’re sure,” Laura said, still hesitant to agree to Grace going back into that studio. Still hesitant to go back herself. “If you want out, I’ll support you. If you don’t, I’ll go to rehearsals with you. Give you a little moral support.”

Grace’s shoulders sagged in relief. “You will?”

“Of course I will. Where else would I be?” She squeezed her niece’s hand. “You’re the most important thing in my life.”

“You hate _The Nutcracker,_.”

Teenagers had no appreciation for the nuances of life. Laura didn’t hate _The Nutcracker,_ , not exactly. She didn’t hate anything, except maybe Jack Cottle. “I don’t hate it. And I love you. And my job is to take care of you.”

“I thought your job was the yoga studio.”

Laura shrugged. Technically, her niece had a point, but what good was being the boss if she couldn’t throw her weight around? “Tory can run the yoga studio for a while. You need me more.”

Grace finished her cereal and rinsed the bowl before placing it carefully in the dishwasher. “Aunt Laura?” she asked in a small voice. “Who takes care of you?”

Her heart melted at the question, but she squared her shoulders and plastered a smile on her face. “I take care of me. Now, grab your things, and let’s go.”

She settled into the studio, tucked back as unobtrusively as possible in the empty room. Grace went through her warmup routine, demi-plies and plies, ronde de jambs, degages and grande battements. Once her muscles were ready, she dropped to the floor and began to stretch.

“Hold, don’t bounce,” Laura called over her book. “You don’t want to tear a muscle and knock yourself out of the show.”

“I know that,” came the muffled reply. Laura smirked and turned the page. Grace may be set on listening to her teachers, but she still didn’t have much interest in listening to her aunt. Well, that was Bill’s problem now. She was just here to supervise and make sure the day didn’t end in tears. Again.

Kate and Andrew were hot on the trail of their murder suspect by the time Bill and Grace’s timid young cavalier showed up. “Didn’t realize we’d have an audience,” he snapped.

She pushed herself further into her chair, not bothering to look up from her book. “I’m just here to keep the peace.”

He grunted at that, the only response she was likely to get from him. “You ready?” he asked Grace. She popped up to her feet, and Laura smiled at how easily her niece moved. No creaking joints, no aching muscles. Oh, to be fourteen again. Grace yanked off her warm-ups and took her spot on the mark taped to the floor.

“I’m ready,” she said, with a confidence that Laura knew she didn’t quite feel.

Bill waved the boy to her side. “Hold your turnout, both of you. People pay to see dancers, not ducks.”

Laura suppressed a chuckle at that. Back in the early days of their partnership, Bill had had some choice words about her turnout as well. He’d never used that particular analogy, but some of the words he’d spat at her certainly _rhymed_ with duck. Grace and her partner - David, wasn’t that his name? - adjusted their feet, and Bill cued up the music..

Maybe it was her presence, or maybe it was her niece’s newly adjusted attitude, but the rehearsal seemed to be going swimmingly. Laura kept her head down, determined not to interfere unless absolutely necessary, and tried to keep her attention focused on her book. She had just gotten absorbed into a chase through Prohibition-era secret tunnels when the sound of her name called her out of the imaginary world of gangsters, molls and jewel heists.

“Roslin,” Bill snapped when she finally put the book down and turned her attention to the three people staring intently at her. “Get over here.”

Oh, this wasn’t going to be good. She tucked the book in her bag and walked over to the mark her former partner indicated on the floor.

“Croise derriere” he barked, and she took the position.

“David,” - so it _was_ David - “when you’re partnering, you have to be ready. If her weight is off balance, you have to correct it. She’s trusting you to make her look good.”

Bill’s eyes met hers. “Bourree, then double pirouette.” She echoed the steps mechanically, grateful that the tennis shoes she wore this morning didn’t catch too firmly on the marley rubber floor. She hadn’t done a double pirouette in years, but her body remembered the mechanics - deep plie, abs engaged, tuck her arms in to give her partner room to guide her. Bills’ fingertips skated across her hips as she turned, then dug into her skin to stop her momentum at the proper beat in the music. She held her position, and her breath, as he leaned over her shoulder to address the two kids watching.

“You can’t be afraid to touch her. She’s not going to break.”

Well, wasn’t that the issue. She tried to pull away from him, but he held her more firmly in his grasp. “You have to trust your partner,” he said. “Work with her, not against her.”

“Bill,” she whispered, and he dropped his hands. She scooted away from him, her skin still tingling from where his hands had rested so many times before, fingers curling into the shape of the curves and angles he had once known so well. She turned to go back to her chair and her book, but his hand on her arm stopped her.

“You signed on for this,” he reminded her. He nodded to the empty space next to him. “Don’t be chickenshit, Roslin. If I have to coach these kids, so do you.”

She didn’t say much over the next hour, just murmured small corrections about hand placement and head position. Bill did all the heavy lifting, just as he’d done when they’d worked together all those years ago. She kept trying to ease away from him, to go back to her chair and her book, but the moment she got out of arm’s reach, he’d call her back and use her to demonstrate another mishandled landing.

By the time the rehearsal was done, the kids were red-faced and sweating, and Laura’s nerves were shot. Bill excused Grace and David to go get changed. Laura dove for her bag, naively thinking that she could sneak past him. She dropped her eyes and headed for the door of the studio, but he stopped her with a hand on her hip, the same hand that had always fit so perfectly against her body.

“You did good today,” he said, so softly that she almost couldn’t hear him over the hum of the sound system.

She shrugged. She was there, that was all. Anyone could have done what she did, with a little bit of training. His wife could have played the same part, she reminded herself. Could have, and should have, and she should get as far away from him as possible.

“This isn’t me anymore, Bill,” she whispered. His gaze burned into her forehead, but she refused to meet his eyes.

“Bullshit,” he said. “This was always you. This is who you are. Why you need me to remind you of that is beyond me.”

She shook her head. Who was he to tell her who she was? He didn’t know her anymore. “This is who Grace is. She’s the dancer now, and she’s ready to listen to you. I don’t need to be here.” She was halfway through the door when his voice stopped her.

“Don’t you miss it, Laura?” The hitch in his voice tugged at her heart, made her remember the man he used to be and the woman who wanted nothing more than to be in his arms, onstage and off. “Don’t you want this for yourself?” She had no idea if he meant the dancing, or the nights they’d spent together in a falling-down Brooklyn walk-up dreaming about the future. Either way, she couldn’t answer him.

What she wanted for herself stopped being important eight years and an icy highway ago. She shook her head, refusing to look up at him and trying desperately to force her feet to carry her down the hallway.

“What I want doesn’t matter,” she said softly. “It’s what Grace wants that matters.” She turned to go, but before she could let the door close between them, his fingers were digging into her arm and pulling her back into the studio.

“Bullshit,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “You’re still in there. I can see it, even if you can’t.” He held up the remote, skipping ahead on the CD until the first notes of the pas de deux echoed through the studio. Still holding firmly to her hand, he guided her to the center of the studio. “I know you remember,” he said.

She did remember, and that’s what hurt the most. She remembered every step, every turn, every carefully crafted movement. She remembered every class, every rehearsal and every argument. She remembered Bill rubbing her back, Bill arguing for her promotion to principal dancer. She remembered Bill presenting her with roses at curtain call, his blue eyes full of promise that roses were the least of what she’d get from him.

She let him guide her through the choreography, lifting her and holding her and supporting her when she stumbled. Years of teaching yoga had kept her body strong and supple, but yoga was a poor substitute for ballet. She fumbled through moves that had once come so naturally to her, but he was there to steady her when she lost her balance. As the score built to a crescendo, she gave up trying to fight it and launched herself into his arms, trusting him to catch her the same way he had all those years ago.

He pulled her up from the final pose and tucked her against him, the same way he’d done after every bow in those three years that they’d danced together. “I know you’ve missed this,” he whispered.

For the briefest of seconds, she let him hold her. She breathed in, loving the smell of him, sweat and soap and something that she’d never be able to explain to anyone who hadn’t lived for these moments in a room lined with mirrors. Loving the feel of his arms wrapped around her. For just a second, she could pretend that she was still just Laura and he was still just Bill, and they had the world at their feet.

The door opened, and Grace eased her way back into the room, bag slung over her shoulder and beat-up sweatpants covering her tights.

“I have to go,” she said. She disentangled herself from Bill’s arms, pushing him away again.

“Come to class tomorrow,” he said.

She shook her head. “I don’t take class, I teach class.”

Bill’s eyebrow quirked. “You teach yoga, not ballet. Come to class, or don’t set foot in my rehearsal studio again.”

She threw her bag over her shoulder and reached out for Grace’s hand. “Goodbye, Bill.”

Somehow, this time, it didn’t seem so final.

***

She stared at her closet. Somewhere, buried under old clothes and worn-out sheets was the box of photographs that Bill had sent her all those years ago. She’d pulled out all of the pictures of her parents and sisters, but the photos of her and Bill still sat in cardboard, still buried under moth-eaten sweaters. Still sharing space with the dance bag that held her leotards, tights and shoes from that last day in the ABT studios, reeking of sweat and coated in rosin.

Company class. She shouldn’t even be thinking about it, but she couldn’t get his words out of her head. Did she miss ballet? Of course she did. She didn’t regret giving up her life to raise Grace - _not at all, not for a minute,_ she reminded herself - but she missed dancing. She missed losing herself to music and trusting her partner to catch her when she was on the verge of falling. She missed sharing the stage with Bill. Yoga was a way to fill the hours, but ballet…ballet was old and new at the same time. Ballet was a vocabulary without words, spoken with cautious steps and outstretched arms. Even before she met Bill, even before what Jack said about her becoming an artist, ballet was how she expressed what she’d always been too afraid to say out loud.

She’d found her voice in her feet, echoed ancient stories in the placement of her arms, called to her love with the delicate turn of her head. The Black Swan’s rage, Sleeping Beauty’s deadly curse, Juliet’s anguish, she’d felt them all onstage. She loved, she lost, she hated, and always, Bill was there to match her, power and rage and fear and angst. Jack was right; she had always been a better dancer because of Bill. He made her believe.

She’d tucked that all away on a snowy night in December, but today for the first time in years…she wanted to feel that again, feel the way the old words of a familiar story melted into music, feel the way bodies and music met in time. Somewhere in this closet was the Laura Roslin who danced to the melody of life. She just had to be brave enough to listen to it once again.


	2. Chapter 2

She ducked into the studio a good ten minutes before 9am, settling herself into the farthest corner of the room. Other dancers trickled in, most not even noticing her, but some familiar faces eyed her curiously. Kids that had watched her in rehearsals years ago, hoping and praying for a company contract of their own. Kids that were no longer kids but soloists and principals in their own right.

She was a fool for being here. Her beat-up ballet slippers felt foreign on her feet, and the elastic waistband on the tights she’d swiped from Grace’s stash of performance gear dug painfully into her waist. She was a fool for letting Bill plant this idea in her head. Her 10am beginning yoga class would wonder where she was. Would wonder why Tory was there to walk them impatiently through sun salutations.

She had responsibilities, and ignoring them because Bill asked her to come to class was stupid. She didn’t belong here, not anymore. She was tempted to gather up her things and beat a hasty retreat when a voice she hadn’t heard in years stopped her.

“You don’t have a lot of room back there. Scoot up a bit, or you’ll take out a window.”

Karl Agathon. Was he really so grown-up now? She knew he was in Pennsylvania and dancing with Jack, but the gangly kid who had been so unsure all those years ago was now standing in front of her, filled out and looking every bit as confident as Bill had in her first ABT company class, when she was the gawky newcomer.

“I’m fine where I am,” she said softly. And she was, she was perfectly content to be hidden away from prying eyes in the first ballet class she’d taken in eight years. Perfectly content to let the disaster she knew would unfold in the next hour and a half stay contained to a small corner of the room, but Karl kicked her bag out of the way and pushed her, gently but firmly, in front of him at the barre.

“I used to watch you in class,” he said. “Couldn’t remember a combination to save my life, but I watched you and I figured it out.”

She shook her head and stumbled over her feet, trying to get back to where she could struggle though the barre unobserved, but he was having none of it.

“This is my spot,” he said with a smile. “You’re a guest here. You don’t get to take my spot.” He rested his hand on the barre, ignoring her soft protestations. “Class is starting,” he said.

Class was starting indeed. Bill strode into the room, snapping at the pianist. “Plies,” he barked.

 _Plies_ , she mumbled under her breath. Somewhere, under the years of yoga, her quads surely remembered how to do plies. After the first two combinations, her muscles quivering and burning, she wasn’t as sure anymore, but Laura Roslin wasn’t a quitter. Cramping feet and shaking legs be damned, she’d keep going. She stumbled through the barre exercises, grateful for Karl’s voice over her shoulder telling her that she was doing great. She wasn’t doing great, not at all, but at least she was able to hold her own. More or less.

Bill ignored her completely until the frappe exercise. She was working out the combination in her head, not paying attention until she felt those familiar strong hands on her hips. It wasn’t surprising; frappes had always been her least favorite exercise, and more than one teacher had poked and prodded at her until she held the proper form. It was surprising how comfortably his hands settled on her waist, and how solid he felt behind her as he tugged at her misaligned hips.

“You’re sinking,” he said as he nudged her supporting leg with his knee.

She was sinking, she knew it. She was cheating the movement, same way she’d done when she was 22 and hung over after the rare nights when her discipline escaped her in favor of cheap margaritas with the corps de ballet in midtown. Still, having him standing behind her, one hand pushing her hip into alignment while the other tapped her working thigh, didn’t remind her so much of proper body position as it did all the other nights that he’d touched her, when she was drunk on something far stronger and more dangerous than cheap tequila.

She tensed in his arms, trying to correct her placement. He pulled away as she straightened her posture into the correct position. It was a correction, nothing more. Nothing that she didn’t do for her students in beginning yoga. No reason for her to be flushed and struggling to breathe.

If nothing else, the skin tingling from the touch of his hands kept her in perfect alignment for the rest of the barre.

“Center floor,” Bill snapped. The company lined up in front of him, claiming their usual spots and adjusting their spacing so that he could see all of them. She shouldn’t have been surprised at how easily they took orders from him, but the Bill she knew all those years ago was hardly an authority figure. This Bill commanded a room as easily as he commanded the audience. They wanted to please him. They wanted his praise and his attention. Deep down, she was proud of him. On the surface, she was hoping he’d leave her alone for the rest of the class.

“Adagio,” he said, ignoring the grumbles and moans of the dancers. He hummed out a melody to the pianist, then surveyed the room in front of him. She tried to hide behind Karl, but she could feel him searching for her.

“Roslin,” he said.

Well, so much for leaving her alone. She didn’t want to be front and center, didn’t want to have all of those young eyes on her, but 20 years of obeying ballet teachers without question was hard to ignore. She stood in fifth position in front of him as he sped through the steps of the adagio, mimicking his words with her hands. 

“Ready?” he asked. If she said no, she had no doubt he would let her off the hook, but she wasn’t going to give up, not with these kids staring daggers into her back. She let herself go to the music, echoing his words in her head as she fought against age and gravity to answer his choreography.

“Turnout,” he echoed. “Not a yoga class.”

 _Dancers, not ducks_. She checked her placement, struggling to remember the body mechanics she knew so well as a child. She was still flexible, but not as flexible as she’d been. He settled a hand against her hip, standing just close enough to her that she could feel his warmth through the layers she refused to tug off. Yoga might have kept her flexible, but she didn’t have the same skinny legs she had the last time she’d been in class with Bill, and she’d be damned if she let a bunch of 22-year-olds laugh at her cellulite in pink tights.

“Ribs over hips,” he whispered. He settled his fingers at the base of her spine. Whether it was the nearness of him or the correction she’d heard more times than she could count over the years, she shifted her ribcage a few centimeters away from where his hand was burning into her back.

“Pull up,” he said.

She took a deep breath and engaged her muscles, pulling herself into a more stable position. More stable, and closer to him. Her shoulders brushed against his solid chest as she talked herself through the combination, listening for each beat in the music to guide her transitions from one step to the next. Developpe en avant, shift to second, rotate to arabesque. He backed away, giving her room to penche, but she didn’t miss the hand just at the corner of her eye, ready to catch her if she lost her balance as she reached for the floor while her left leg rose to the ceiling. She caught herself just as her ankle started to wobble and pulled back up into arabesque, rising on demi-pointe and falling gracefully through to the end position of the combination. She held the pose, and her breath, waiting for the inevitable critiques on form or timing.

“See?” Bill said, his back to her as he addressed the company. “This may be a class, but don’t ever forget - even if it’s just for me, even if it’s just for you all, or our friend Michel on the piano, who gets paid no matter what you do in here - you are artists. It’s not just technique. It’s art. You have to feel it. If you don’t feel it in the classroom, you’ll never feel it on stage.”

He patted her back, releasing her from the pose she held. “Thank you, Miss Roslin. Karl, Regina, Sharon. Front and center, and show me that you feel it.”

She ducked back to the far corner of the studio, more than willing to let the kids step up to the hot seat.

By the time she’d taken two turns across the floor for the grande allegro, her muscles were jelly and she was ready to collapse where she stood. Bill waved to the pianist and bowed before the class, and she returned the reverence with applause along with the rest of the company. The company dancers filed out of the room, chatting about rehearsals and casting and whatever torture Jack had inflicted on them for the rest of the day. She collapsed in a heap in front of her bag, trying to find the energy to tug off her slippers. Once upon a time, she’d done this every day as a warm-up for six-hour rehearsals. Now, she just wanted to crawl into a bathtub and drown in hot water, Epsom salts and a bottle of pinot grigio.

 _I’m too old for this,_ she thought.

She eased her feet out of the slippers and massaged her aching arches. With any luck, she’d have the studio to herself for another ten minutes or so before the inevitable rehearsals started, enough time to stretch out her tight hamstrings and convince her old bones to carry her down the hall, out the door, and to her car.

“No pointe shoes?”

She snickered, despite her aching feet and burning lungs. “No pointe shoes. I said I’d come to company class. I didn’t say that I’d subject myself to torture just so that you could get a laugh.”

Bill settled himself opposite her, tugging her feet into his lap and working his thumbs into her arches. “We need to work on your opinion of me.”

God, she wished she had a witty comeback, but the pads of his thumbs digging into her sore feet robbed her of all conscious thought. He always did know how to render her speechless. She hummed a little at his ministrations. “Do you do this for every washed-up dancer that takes class with you?”

He shrugged. “I’ll let you know.” He tugged at her toes, each one in turn, then flexed her feet against his palms. “Breathe.”

Hard to breathe, when he was here, working through her tired muscles, giving her the kind of TLC she hadn’t experienced in almost a decade. She was having a hard time breathing, but he was completely unaffected by her feet in his lap.

And why should he be? Sure, she’d come to class, she’d let herself be guided by him, but in a few minutes, she’d leave the studio, and he’d go about his day. When the lights shut off in the Pennsylvania Ballet building tonight, he’d go home to his wife, and she’d go home to an almost empty house. She shouldn’t have come here. She should have let the past stay in the past. She should get as far away from his strong hands as possible.

Laura pulled her feet out of his lap and tucked them underneath her. “That was a great class, Bill,” she said. “I didn’t know you were such a good teacher.”

He shrugged. “If you’d come back, you would have known.” A hint of bitterness.

“If I’d come back, you wouldn’t have gotten married. And had kids. Two boys, or so I heard.”

He grunted in response. “Maybe things work out the way they’re supposed to.”

If this was the way things were supposed to work out, she clearly owed some serious karmic debts to the Laura Roslins of the past. Still, it wasn’t fair to punish Bill for the choices she’d made all those years ago. She pushed herself to her feet, ignoring her protesting muscles. “I should go. I imagine you have work to do today.” It was _Nutcracker_ season, after all, and he had a rehearsal with Grace at 2pm.

He grabbed her old, beat-up dance bag and offered it to her. “I have a break until noon. Would you…like to get some coffee?”

She should say no. She should thank him for the trip down memory lane and walk out of the studio. “Coffee sounds good,” she heard herself say before her brain could catch up to her mouth. He offered her his arm, chuckling a little bit as she clutched it tightly, wobbling on shaky legs as they made their way out of the studio.

Pennsylvania Ballet’s rehearsal studios didn’t leave many options other than the requisite Starbucks, greasy spoons and a few ramen shops, so they found themselves tucked into a small deli that promised the best cheesesteaks in town, directly across the street from another sandwich shop that promised the same. Laura ordered a cup of tea; Bill ordered a large coffee and tossed a bag of kettle chips on the counter.

“The perks of retirement,” he joked.

She stifled a laugh. Even at the height of his career, Bill ate like a teenager. Their fridge used to be packed with fresh vegetables and lean protein for her; the freezer was full of Hot Pockets and microwave meals with enough sodium to take down a horse. She waved away the bag when he offered it to her.

“Some things never change,” she said with a fond smile. “Do you still salt your tortilla chips when you go out for Mexican food?”

He nodded. “Do you still eviscerate your veggie burritos before you eat them?”

He used to laugh at her, picking around the tortilla carcass as she dug out the beans and vegetables, before finishing off the sad remnants of her burrito. And, more often than not, the margarita that she’d abandoned halfway through dinner in favor of water.

“I still don’t eat the tortilla, no. But at least now I finish my drink like an adult .”

Bill didn’t answer, just raised an eyebrow and shot a pointed glass at the mug of tea that she’d barely touched. He polished off the last of the chips, crumpled the bag, and tossed it on the table.

“So, Laura Roslin,” he said.

“So, Bill Adama,” she mimicked. Was he looking for an opening to an awkward conversation, or just struggling to make small talk? Either way, she wasn’t sure she could help him there. Her nerves were so tightly wound she was shocked that she was able to sit relatively still in the uncomfortable wooden chair.

“Your hair’s shorter. Looks good on you.”

Her hair? She hadn’t sat face-to-face with him in eight years, and he wanted to talk about her _hair?_

“So’s yours. And grayer.”

Bill laughed, absently brushing a hand through his hair. “Two kids. It’ll do that to you.”

Two kids and a wife, she reminded herself. Three reasons she shouldn’t be sitting here, pretending that she and Bill were just old friends catching up on old times.

“Did they come to Philadelphia with you? Your wife and kids?” And there it was, the awkward conversation she’d been hoping to avoid. One of these days, she’d learn to think before she opened her mouth, but today was most definitely not that day.

Bill shook his head. “No, the kids are with Carolanne. She’s teaching in Ithaca now. She moved there three years ago, after…” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence, just shrugged his shoulders and started fiddling with the empty bag on the table.

 _After._ If there was one thing Laura understood, it was _after_. “I’m sorry, Bill,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his hand, a friendly gesture between old friends, she told herself. He squeezed back, his blue eyes meeting hers, and the weight in his gaze had her pulling away and tucking her hands into her lap.

He held her gaze for a few seconds before she managed to look away, searching for something else in the room to focus on. A cheap plastic tablecloth, a stained menu, a screaming toddler, anything but Bill looking at her that familiar ache written all over his face.

They were both living their afters now, and digging up old ghosts and old regrets wouldn’t do either one of them a damn bit of good.

“So,” Bill said, his fingers idly tapping on the worn tablecloth, “eight years after you retired, you’re still knee-deep in _The Nutcracker._ ” He grinned at her, no doubt remembering her incessant bitching about the annual holiday torture that awaited them. “I suppose it was too much to hope that Grace wanted to be a basketball player.”

She jumped on the lighter mood, happy to steer the conversation back to Grace and away from the two of them. “I was this close to escaping this year. This close, and then Jack Cottle had to show up and ruin everything.”

“He’s good at that,” Bill agreed.

“Well,” Laura shrugged, “I guess it’s important to have a skill in life.”

“She’s really talented, your niece.” He gave her a stern glare, even as he fought the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I won’t tell her that, of course, but she’s got a lot of potential. I see a lot more _Nutcrackers_ in her future. And maybe a _Sleeping Beauty_ or two, and a _Romeo and Juliet_.”

“And a _Giselle_ ,” Laura whispered.

This time, it was Bill who reached out to her, cupping her chin and raising her eyes to meet his. “And a _Giselle._ ”

All of a sudden, it was too much for her. She could handle another godforsaken _Nutcracker_ , she could handle Bill being in Philadelphia, she could handle going back into the studio for company class and feeling her body ache for the life she left behind. She couldn’t handle Bill touching her, looking at her with such tenderness, remembering the dream that she’d left unfulfilled in New York.

“I have to go,” she said, pushing herself away from the table. “I’ll have Grace in the studio this afternoon.”

“Laura-” he called after her, but she let the door to the deli slam behind her. Grace would have to deal with rehearsals on her own. Laura had a life outside of ballet now, and she needed to get back to it before the before swallowed her up and destroyed her once again.


	3. Chapter 3

Laura waited, tapping her fingers impatiently against the steering wheel, for Grace to emerge from her afternoon rehearsal. Grace had texted her that she’d be an hour late getting out, and Laura was starving. What on earth could be so complicated that the kids needed an extra hour to rehearse?

_We’ll be done at 6, not 5. Mr. Adama says you can come in and watch if you want._

Fat chance. It had been a week since their disastrous encounter over coffee, and Laura was already frazzled enough trying to hide in her car every time she picked up or dropped off Grace for rehearsals. Frazzled, and deeply annoyed with herself that her 14-year-old niece was acting more like an adult than she was these days. A grown woman, a professional in her own right, hiding in her car from her ex-boyfriend.

As the minutes ticked by, Laura grew more impatient and more frustrated. With herself, her niece, or the situation, she couldn’t be sure, but by 6:15, she was sick of waiting. She was going to have a long talk with Grace about being respectful of other people’s time. To which Grace would undoubtedly respond that being respectful also meant not walking out on a rehearsal just because her aunt was having a minor middle-school meltdown in the car over the boy she used to like.

Sometimes being the adult was completely overrated.

Laura sighed and turned off the ignition, tucking her keys in her purse as she climbed out of the car. Better to go inside and see what was taking so long than to sit in the car and worry herself into yet another upset stomach and a sleepless night.

She pushed open the doors of the building just in time to get caught in an avalanche of children, parents and dance bags. Clearly rehearsal was over at last. Craning her neck over the crowd, she searched for her niece, but Grace was nowhere to be found. Very well, now she could start prepping her lecture.

The receptionist pointed her in the direction of the large rehearsal studio just off the lobby, and Laura peeked in the door to see the snowflakes listening intently as Jack walked them through what appeared to be spacing issues. Jack saw her and waved her in, pointing off to the side to where Grace, David and Bill stood watching.

So much for avoiding Bill. She heaved a sigh and eased into the room, working her way around clumps of corps dancers who were talking about choreography or gossiping about other company members. Laura came to a stop a few feet away from Grace’s little group, raising her eyebrow and tapping her watch when Grace finally looked up and noticed her. Her niece excused herself and came over to Laura, round face full of sheepish apology.

“Sorry,” Grace said with a grin. “Mr. Adama thought it might be a good idea for us to see an actual rehearsal.”

“Mr. Adama obviously doesn’t care that you probably have algebra homework to finish.”

“Nope,” Grace said, pointing behind her to a stack of books pushed against the studio wall. “Finished it during party scene rehearsal. The party parents took _forever_ today.”

Laura laughed, remembering a little wistfully her own years of tedious downtime while others rehearsed around her. Yet another thing that nobody realized about the glamorous world of ballet - rehearsals for large numbers like the party scene were roughly 20% sweating and 80% sitting around and waiting for everyone else to get their acts together.

“Still,” she argued, “It’s after six. You must be hungry.”

Grace turned big, pleading eyes on her, effectively melting Laura’s irritation. “Please, can’t we watch for a little bit longer? This isn’t all the kids running around. These are actual professional dancers.”

She was tempted to argue, but deep down, Laura thought it might be good for Grace’s slightly overdeveloped ego to watch the corps dancers at work. Grace still harbored the teenage notion that only the stars of the show mattered. Granted, if Grace ever made it as a professional dancer, she’d learn the hard way that everyone, regardless of talent or training or swollen ego, started at the bottom and stayed there until the artistic director could mold them into something he or she considered worthy of a promotion. Better she see that now, while she was still young enough to learn to check her attitude at the studio door.

“Fine,” she agreed. “But not for the full rehearsal. You may not be hungry, but I am.”

Grace took her hand and dragged her over to where Bill and David stood watching the rehearsal unfold. She smiled at David and nodded at Bill, a little surprised when he returned her nod with a cool incline of his chin. It made her feel marginally better that she was not the only one uncomfortable sharing space.

“Group two,” Jack called, interrupting her thoughts and turning her attention back to the center of the room. “Entrance.”

The dancers took their positions and bourréed into position, barely hitting their taped marks on the floor before Jack paused the music. “Second line, you’re rushing. Keep your eyes on the first line.” He waved them back to their starting positions and re-cued the music, barking at them with his characteristically sharp words to hold their lines straight and follow each other.

Laura watched as the snowflakes repeated the same four eight-counts again and again until Jack was satisfied that they were ready to move on. The corps watched each other carefully, dancing in perfect unison. They were a motley crew in mismatched, colorful leotards, ripped and cut-off tights, and warm-ups in varying patterns of stripes, colors and polka dots. Each different, but together almost indistinguishable in their perfectly aligned movements.

This was what Laura missed most about ballet. Not the performances, or the curtain calls, or the solo roles. She missed dancing with a company, striving to be better, striving to reach that ever-elusive perfection. Some dancers dreamed of being prima ballerinas, filling opera houses and bringing crowds to their feet in standing ovations, but Laura kept going day after day because she loved the work. She loved being part of something older and bigger than herself. She loved learning new choreography, repeating it over and over again until it worked its way into her muscle memory. If she’d never made it out of the corps de ballet, she would have been perfectly happy with her lot in life.

She would never have been a principal dancer if it hadn’t been for Bill, pushing her every step of the way, forcing her to aim higher and to be better. Making her believe that she deserved more than she thought she wanted. She cast a sidelong glance at him, taking in his stiff posture and the slightly dour look on his face. She could tell he was itching to get in there with Jack and argue about some of the corrections he was giving his dancers, but ballet was nothing if not rigid, and he wouldn’t dream of undermining Jack’s authority.

Not in front of his dancers, anyway. The corners of her mouth twitched as she imagined Bill giving Jack an earful after the rehearsal. Bill might want Laura to work at tempering Grace’s ego, but she doubted he had any intention of doing the same for his own.

It was oddly comforting to her, eight years after walking out of their lives, to find herself back in this room with these two men and know that despite their graying hair and softening muscles, not much had changed.

Grace nudged Laura with her shoulder. “It’s really something, isn’t it? Look at how perfect they are.”

“The corps is the heart of the ballet,” Laura said automatically. “They set the stage. It’s the hardest job in the company, because you absolutely have to trust the dancers around you, and they absolutely have to trust you. Make a mistake when you’re alone on the stage, and the audience might never know. Make a mistake in the corps, and you’ll ruin it for everyone else.”

Grace mulled that over, working it out in her head. Where Laura had always been focused on class and rehearsal and perfecting her technique, Grace loved being onstage and being praised by her classmates and teachers for her natural gifts. “Mr. Adama says that ballet isn’t about a person, or a role. He says it’s about the art, and we’re all just bit players in a story bigger than all of us.”

She couldn’t stop the snort that escaped her. Sure, back in the day, Bill was all about the art, but she certainly didn’t remember him ever saying he was a bit player in anything. She cast another appraising glance at the man standing just a few feet away. Maybe more had changed over the last eight years than she thought.

Funny how she could know somebody so well, and yet have him be a complete stranger. Funny how they were here, standing just a few feet away from each other in a rehearsal studio again, barely able to make eye contact. Funny how life seemed to repeat itself, two stubborn people once again in a painfully awkward situation, and she was powerless to stop it.

Jack guided the snowflakes through their rehearsal, every now and then looking back at her after making a comment as if to ask, _and what would you do?_ She shook her head and pressed her lips together. She was here to pick up Grace, and that was all. If Jack couldn’t see that the third group of snowflakes was entering a half-count too late, well, that was his problem. She’d made it abundantly clear that she had no interest in working for the man, and she would be damned if she’d let him railroad her into it in front of Bill Adama.

Let Grace absorb the ebb and flow of rehearsal. Let her take in the corrections and echo them in her own body as Jack spoke. Let Grace watch the young corps dancers with hero worship in her eyes. Laura just didn’t have room in her heart for it anymore.

She could miss this life, could wish that things were different, but at the end of the day, she had a hungry teenager to feed, she had bills to pay, and she had a yoga class to teach in the morning. While Grace watched, completely enraptured by the snowflakes’ jetés en tournant around the Snow Fairy, Laura packed up her niece’s bag and hefted it to her shoulder.

“Grace,” she whispered. “Time to go.” Grace shook her head, stubborn as always, but Laura had the car keys, and Laura made the rules. She dragged her niece out of the studio, stopping to pat David on the shoulder and nodding to Jack as he snapped his fingers along with the music. She didn’t turn back to look at Bill, and he didn’t turn to watch her leave the studio. Some things were better left in the past.

***

 _Laura Roslin_. Here in the flesh, just as beautiful and just as rigid as she’d been the first time he’d met her eleven years ago. Laura Roslin, just as angry in their meeting in the Pennsylvania Ballet lobby as she’d been that first night that they’d shared a stage. Laura Roslin, still determined to make him work for even the slightest hint of a smile from her.

Laura Roslin, still slipping away from him even as he tried to pull her close. He thought that by inviting her to coffee, he’d be able to break down the walls she’d built around herself, the walls she’d erected to shut him out. As always, he’d underestimated her.

He didn’t come to Pennsylvania to see her again. In fact, he’d demanded before taking the short-term job that he not see her again. It took him years to get over her, years that he should have spent alone until he could wake up and not feel the ghost of her breath on his shoulder. Years that he’d spent married to Carolanne in a failed attempt to chase her out of his head, to replace her with someone else.

He loved his sons more than anything, but Carolanne…at first, he’d thought that he could forget about Laura by falling back into a relationship with Carolanne. One of the perks of being a straight man in ballet was that he had his pick of the women in the company, and when he was a young man, he’d chosen well. The strongest and the prettiest of the bunch, all grateful to spend a season or two with him. Carolanne, with her fiery temper and her possessive streak, had held him for more than a year, but when she’d been injured, he really hadn’t missed her. He hadn’t spared her another thought once Laura Roslin placed her hand in his.

For the first few months that he’d partnered Laura, he thought that how quickly he’d forgotten Carolanne spoke to a glaring character flaw on his behalf, until he realized how thoroughly and completely his new partner had gotten under his skin. She was timid and unsure in those first rehearsals, but she wasn’t a pushover. He quickly learned that she wouldn’t argue with him out loud, but she refused to back down when he came at her. Which he did. A lot.

That first night that he’d danced with her onstage, it had been like dancing with a robot. She’d executed the correct steps in perfect time, but she refused to look at him onstage. It wasn’t until he’d grabbed her in the wings, pushing into her personal space, and hissed a few scant centimeters from her face that he wasn’t going to ruin his career dancing with someone who didn’t care about the audience that he’d gotten anything close to a reaction from her. She’d shoved him away from her, angry and afraid, and asked if he was going to replace her. He could see the tears of rage welling up in her eyes. He wasn’t sure if she was going to punch him in the face or quit on the spot, but in that moment, he had no doubt that she’d rather die than cry in front of him.

He couldn’t remember now what he’d said to her to get her back onstage for the second act, but whatever it was, it had worked. It had pissed her off enough to bring a barely restrained fire to her performance. In all his years of dancing, he’d never seen anything like her performance that night. He’d danced with friends, with partners, with lovers, but he’d never danced with anyone who clutched so desperately to a thin shred of control over the rage quaking through her body. It was the most passionate pas de deux he’d ever experienced in his lifetime, delivered by a dancer who could barely remember upstage from downstage.

He might kill her before the season ended, he’d thought, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to replace her.

She’d spent the rest of that season alternating between glaring at him and ignoring him, almost daring him to push her past her breaking point. He’d brush up right against it before backing away. She was still young, still trying to find her footing in the company, and he was professional enough to help her transition from inexperienced soloist to principal dancer. Baiting her was really more for his benefit than hers. 

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have wasted his time, but he had to admit…he liked her. He didn’t want to, he didn’t need to, but he liked her. So he kept pushing her, because dammit, he’d get her to laugh if it killed him.

She had all the raw material, technique better than he’d ever seen, and a wealth of untapped emotion. She was just waiting for someone to tease it out of her. And tease it out he did, bit by bit, watching her blossom on stage while she fought with him in the wings, criticizing the emotion he baited her with and reminding him to get his head together, because they had two more weeks in the season, and she wasn’t going to let him wear her out.

He wasn’t sure if he wore her out or she did him, but at the end of the season, they were something resembling friendly. At the end of the year, they were something resembling close. At the end of _The Nutcracker’s_ run, they were in bed together every night, and he’d never been happier.

And here they were, facing off over another _Nutcracker,_ and she was a stranger to him.

He let himself into the small apartment Jack had found for him not far from the rehearsal studios, flipping on light switches and dropping shoes, bags and jackets as he made his way to the little galley kitchen. It was a far cry from the townhouse in Hoboken that he’d shared with Carolanne and the boys. Barely bigger, in fact, than the Brooklyn walkup he’d lived in with Laura.

Better than a hotel, he shrugged as he unscrewed a bottle of whiskey and poured himself a couple of fingers. He had company class at 9am, but he didn’t much care if he had a hangover for it. If he was going to sit here, once again reliving every minute of his life with Laura, he at least wanted the sharp edges to get a little blurry.

 _Sharp edges_. She always had sharp edges, right up until the moment she decided she liked someone. Sharp edges gave way to sweet words and lingering looks and soft kisses. Nights filled with laughter, legs entertwined on a futon as they watched old movies and argued about the right answers on Jeopardy. (She was usually right. He never admitted it, but she was usually right.)

He settled into the couch and flipped on the tv, just in time to catch the last question in Double Jeopardy. Bill pressed the power button on the remote, and the picture faded.

_The answer is Bill Adama. What is an idiot, Alex? Correct._

When his alarm shook him out of a dead sleep the next morning, he was somewhat surprised to find his head clear. He had two empty glasses on the nightstand - one for whiskey, and one for water. _Getting too old to find your answers in the bottom of a bottle_ , he reminded himself. He’d screwed up his relationship with his sons enough by leaving Carolanne. No reason to add being a drunk to the list of things he’d be paying for in their therapy later. Bill made a mental note to call the boys that evening, and maybe see if Carolanne would be willing to let them come down for a weekend before rehearsals kicked into high gear. In the meantime, he had a class to teach.

When he walked into the studio, his gaze immediately drifted to the corner of the room, same as they’d done every day for the last week and a half. Karl Agathon met his eyes and shrugged, giving him a half-smile that only served to make him feel more pathetic.

Years ago, he’d taken Karl out for a night of cheap beer and let him pour his heart about over his unrequited love for Sharon Valerii, feeling smug that he had a woman who loved him to go home to at the end of the night. Now Karl and Sharon were married, dancing principal roles, and Karl was giving him the equivalent of a pat on the head to a stray dog while Bill pined over the woman who’d left him while he was asleep in their apartment.

Jesus. He knew retirement wouldn’t be fun, but he never thought it would be this bad. He snapped at the pianist and barked out the plié combination. An hour and a half of beating up on the company in class, and then he had a meeting with Jack.

The fun never stopped around here.

When he walked into Jack’s office, his boss was staring down an unlit cigarette. “Jesus, you haven’t given that up yet? Those things will kill you.”

“This job will kill me faster,” Jack huffed.

Bill shrugged, fresh out of sympathy. His gig as a ballet master at ABT wasn’t anything to sneeze at, but he sure as hell hadn’t been offered an artistic director job when he retired. Well, not one that he would take. Washington Ballet and Texas Ballet Theater had sent out feelers, but he wasn’t going to go that far away from his kids, not while Carolanne had primary physical custody. Philadelphia wasn’t that much farther away from Ithaca than New York City. If he’d retired a year earlier, maybe he’d have had a shot at Jack’s gig, but no point in thinking about that now.

The older he got, the more he realized that eventually, he’d have to answer for all the choices he made over the years. Some stung more than others. This one was just a minor irritant. No matter how much better he still believed he’d do at the job, Pennsylvania Ballet was doing well under Jack’s directorship. He wasn’t even sure he liked the guy, but Jack was good at balancing the demands of the staff, the donors and the dancers. How he managed to kiss that much ass was beyond Bill, given how much of a dick Jack was to the people he claimed he liked, but Bill had to give him credit for what he’d accomplished.

Still, that didn’t mean he wanted to work for the guy.

“You’ve been here three weeks, Bill. How long are you going to make me wait until you give me an answer?”

Bill didn’t answer. He just raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms, settling back into the chair. He was in no rush. The way he saw it, Jack needed him a hell of a lot more than he needed Jack. And he was already a ballet master at ABT, so he had no reason to quit that job for a lateral move to an inferior company. No matter what perks Philadelphia had to offer.

 _Philadelphia has no perks_ , he reminded himself.

“Look, Bill, I get it. You’re safe where you are. You’ve been on staff at ABT for a couple of years now, but that’s the best you’re going to do. At least here, you’ll be in charge of the repertory and you’ll be the lead in teaching company class. It might lead to better offers.”

It might, if he kept his mouth shut and let Jack keep digging himself into a hole. He stared down his old rival and waited. If there was one thing Bill Adama had in abundance, it was patience.

“Fine, goddamit. Associate Artistic Director. Would that make you happy?”

Well, it didn’t make him sad. “Come back at me with a better salary offer, and we’ll talk. In the meantime, I have a rehearsal.”

He was halfway out the door before Jack’s voice stopped him, “Bill, there’s nothing better for you in New York. There was nothing better for me there either. Here…you might find something that will make you happy.”

He slammed the door and turned back to Jack. “Something that will make you happy, you mean. You want me to line up all your ducks in a row for you.”

Jack shrugged, his attention back on the pack of cigarettes that he was batting back and forth on his desk. “I don’t give a shit what the ducks do, as long as they do it together and keep my company in the black. I’m offering you a second chance, Bill. Second chances don’t come along very often.” Jack looked up at Bill, his eyes boring straight into him. “Don’t screw this up.”

It was probably way too late for that, but Bill nodded. “I’ll think about it,” he growled.

“Jesus Christ, Bill, maybe stop thinking and start doing.” Jack shook his head and swept the pack of cigarettes into the trash. “Life is short, and getting shorter every day.”

God, he could use a drink. But he had a rehearsal with the mirlitons, followed by another rehearsal with Laura’s niece. Life was short, but the days in Philadelphia were getting longer and longer. He could put Jack off for a few more weeks, but eventually he’d have to figure out what it was that he wanted.

Trouble was, he knew what he wanted. He just didn’t know how to get it.


	4. Chapter 4

Since that first disastrous rehearsal, Grace had been a lot more willing to listen and take corrections, but today…today she was in full teenage temper. She was surly, David was frustrated, and Bill was ready to kick them both out of the studio and head home to his sad apartment and his bottle of whiskey.

If this is what dealing with teenagers was like, maybe he wasn’t so upset that Carolanne had primary custody of his boys.

“You have to trust him! Dammit, Grace, if you keep fighting him, you’re going to get-”

She lost her grip on David’s hand and hit the studio floor with a loud, ungraceful thud.

“-hurt,” Bill finished with a sigh.

Grace pulled her legs in and started rubbing her ankle. “I’m fine,” she said, before he could ask. “Just landed wrong.”

“And why was that?” he asked.

She looked up at him, torn between arguing and throwing herself on his mercy. Landing on her ass seemed to knock a little bit of the attitude out of her, thank God. “Because I didn’t trust my partner?”

“Because you didn’t trust your partner,” he said. “David, go get an ice pack.” As the boy loped out of the studio, Bill settled down on the floor next to Grace and held out his hand for her ankle. She extended her leg, more than a little begrudgingly, and he fought back a chuckle as she set her chin and crossed her skinny arms over her chest. She was going to argue that she was fine, no doubt, but he wasn’t going to continue with the rehearsal and risk doing further damage to her ankle. The last thing he needed right now was Laura descending on him in a rage because he broke her niece.

He pressed against her bones and tendons, carefully studying her face for any sign of pain or discomfort. She furrowed her brow, but otherwise, no reaction. He carefully rotated her ankle, not feeling any catches in the movement. Grace sucked in her breath at the outward rotation, and he stilled his hands.

“Hurts?” he asks.

“A little,” she admitted. “But I’m fine.”

“Grace,” he said. “Does it hurt or not? If it hurts now, and you try to dance on it, you could knock yourself out of the show for good.”

She sighed, her shoulders sinking. “Yes. It hurts.”

God, it was like pulling teeth getting that much out of her. Not hard to see the family resemblance. “We’ll ice it. Finish off the rehearsal with you watching.” David came back in the studio, ice pack in hand, and tossed it to Bill. “You’re going to sit there and listen to everything I say, think about how important it is to trust your partner, and you’re going to call your aunt and tell her you need her to come inside to get you.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but Bill held up his hand. “If you’d listened to me in the first place, you wouldn’t be flat on your ass with an ice pack on your ankle. Call your aunt.”

He walked through the rest of the rehearsal with David, cleaning up his technique and checking to make sure that Grace was paying attention. She mimicked her own choreography with her arms, intent on following the music and seemingly unconcerned with the pain in her ankle. Bill had seen enough bad landings during his tenure to know the difference between a minor fall and a career-ending injury, and he’d be shocked if Grace wasn’t back to full form within the week. Still, it was the right call to have Grace tell her aunt that she’d hurt herself. It was his professional responsibility to make sure that Grace had the proper care. Had nothing to do with wanting to see Laura again.

He’d never sink so low to use a 14-year-old to get to her aunt, he reminded himself as he checked his watch for the sixth time in half an hour, wondering what the hell was taking her so long.

She came barrelling into the studio about 20 minutes before rehearsal was scheduled to end, giving him a brief glare before she dropped to the floor to tuck her arms around her niece. She leaned close and whispered into Grace’s ear, and Bill had to fight back a laugh at how Grace, completely fine two minutes ago, was now making the most pitiful, wounded puppydog face imaginable.

Laura had broken two toes in a modern dance class ten years ago and didn’t say a word until Bill happened to look down and see the swelling that she’d been trying to ignore. Grace might be just as stubborn as her aunt, but she didn’t have that same spine of steel.

Then again, when Bill had minor surgery on his rotator cuff, she’d doted on him for two weeks straight, with warm compresses and ice packs and her soft body curled around his as he tried to get comfortable at night. Having known how…beneficial Laura Roslin’s sympathy could be, he couldn’t begrudge the kid for milking it.

Bill ran through David’s solo twice more, then called an end to the rehearsal. David nodded at Bill’s last minute corrections, waved shyly at Grace, and headed out the door, leaving the three of them in the studio. His footsteps echoed through the now-empty room as he made his way over to his little protégée and her aunt.

Time to face the music.

Grace was still leaning against her aunt’s side, and Bill couldn’t fight a twinge of jealousy as he watched Laura stroke the girl’s hair. He shut off the sound system and gathered Grace’s bag and scattered books. Something, anything, to keep his hands busy. “You ok, kid?”

Torn between wanting sympathy from her aunt and wanting to keep her role, Grace hesitated just a second too long. “You’re fine,” he said. “Quit begging for pity.”

Two firmly set jaws, two steely glares, and two huffs of displeasure. Oh yeah, they were definitely family. “Come on,” he said, holding his hands out to the two women in front of him. “If you can’t walk out of here, I’ll carry you, but if you wreck my back, you’re paying for my rehab.”

Grace took his hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet, but Laura busied herself with collecting Grace’s discarded pointe shoes and leg warmers. Spine of steel, he thought with a smile, watching her turn this way and that to avoid looking at him.

It had taken him two months to have a civil conversation with her years ago. If he could get another out of her before the end of the Nutcracker, he’d consider it a miracle.

“Does it hurt when you put weight on it?” he asked Grace.

She shook her head. “Sore, but it doesn’t hurt.”

He wasn’t sure if he believed her, but he nodded. “Keep icing it and keep it elevated tonight. If it’s  
swollen in the morning, go get it checked out.”

Grace opened her mouth to argue again, but he cut her off before she could answer. “Go get it checked out. Remember, take care of it now or lose your place in the show.”

He reached for the items Laura held in her hands. “Let me,” he said.

Laura tightened her grip on Grace’s discarded pointe shoes. “No, thank you. You’ve done quite enough already today.”

Something about her tone set him on edge. “Grace, go sit for a second.” He pushed the teenager toward the chair in the front of the studio, waiting until she settled herself before he turned on her aunt.

“You have a problem with me, lady, you better spit it out now.”

“She was hurt,” Laura hissed, stepping closer to him. In any other situation, he would have welcomed her invading his space like this, but right now, he was a little afraid of what she’d do once she got within striking distance. “She was hurt, and you gave her an ice pack? What if it’s serious? You know how something minor can become something major. You should have stopped this rehearsal. You should have called the staff PT to come and check her out. But you didn’t. Why?”

It wasn’t her anger that riled his temper; it was her thumping his chest with a pointe shoe that made him snap back at her. “She didn’t blow out her ACL, Laura, she twisted her ankle. How many times have we all done that? She landed wrong, that’s all.”

Jesus, had it been that long since she’d been in a rehearsal with him? Had it been that long since she’d wiped out in company class? “I checked it out, and she was fine, and I didn’t think babying her,” he was surprised at the scorn in his tone, given how he’d felt about watching Laura baby her a few minutes ago, “was going to get her anywhere.” He wrapped his fingers around Laura’s biceps, pushing her back just far enough to save his sternum from more abuse. “I’m not going to  
hurt your niece, Laura. Think whatever else you will of me, but at least know that I won’t do that.”

She stopped her assault by footwear. Whether it was because of what he said, or because his hands dug into into her arms, he wasn’t sure. Either way, both he and his sternum were grateful. “Think whatever else of me, but please don’t think I’d ever do anything to hurt you.”

She stilled in his arms, and for just a second, he thought he had her. She closed her eyes and shook her head, then brought the hands still clutching Grace’s pointe shoes up to rest against his chest.

God, holding on to her like this, having her touching him, was almost enough to kill him. “Laura,” he whispered.

She opened her eyes, and for a second he caught a glimpse of his Laura. “Her,” Laura whispered.

Who?

“Her,” Laura repeated. “You wouldn’t hurt her.”

A minor slip of the tongue, but he wouldn’t apologize for it. Not now. Bill shrugged.”Either. Both.”

He had her for just a second, and then her cool mask slipped back into place. “Thank you,” she said, “but I have it from here.” She pushed him away, and once again, he let her go. He let her go, because it was what she wanted.

Someday soon, he was going to have a long talk with her about what he wanted, but today wasn’t going to be that day.

She took a step back and shifted her grip until she held both pointe shoes in one hand, then held out the other to him. For a second, he thought she was reaching for him, until he realized that Grace’s bag was still looped around his shoulder. He shrugged it off and handed it to her. He could feel the air around him shift, grow heavy and empty, as she walked away from him.

Grace pushed herself to her feet as Laura stepped away from him, looking just as unsure as Bill felt. Laura snapped her fingers and pointed to the door, waving her niece out of the studio. She didn’t turn around, but Grace did, waving a shy goodbye to her coach.

He could just watch her walk out the door again. He should just watch her walk out the door again.

“Laura,” he called out. She stopped in the doorway and looked over her shoulder at him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

She hesitated just long enough for a reply to be completely unnecessary. This time, watching her walk out the door wasn’t such a terrible thing. This time, he knew she’d be back, and he’d be here, waiting for her.

Dammit. He was going to have to accept Jack’s job offer.

***

One of the worst things about his divorce was the silence in the evenings. He didn’t miss Carolanne’s incessant bitching at him, or his own bitching at her, but he missed tripping over the boys as they tried to get dinner on the table. He missed catching up on what happened in daycare and preschool as he helped them build entire cities out of blocks of wood. He missed wrangling Zak into the bath, and he missed reading just one more story to Lee.

He missed his kids.

His marriage to Carolanne had been a disaster from start to finish, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret it, not when he had his sons. He didn’t regret his marriage, but he regretted his divorce because it kept him away from his boys.

Bill called the boys when he got home and spent an hour on the phone with them, long enough to feel like he was still a part of their lives, but not long enough to feel like he was a good father. Carolanne agreed to consider sending the boys to Philadelphia for a weekend. It wasn’t a yes, but it was progress. At this point, he’d take what he could get. His little apartment would be crowded with the three of them, but he’d build a blanket fort in the little living room and they’d camp out with flashlights and junk food, and he’d tell ghost stories just scary enough to capture the imaginations of two preschoolers.

His sons, at four and six, wanted to be dancers just like their Daddy. Bill feared they’d grow out of it, once they got a little older and figured out that being a dancer wasn’t an acceptable career goal for boys growing up in suburban New York, but for now…he loved the idea that his kids would follow in his footsteps.

Did Laura feel the same about Grace? Somehow, he doubted it. In the few weeks he’d worked with Grace, she’d been full of ideas and opinions, all parroted from her teachers at the Rock School. Grace had never volunteered an opinion shared by her aunt.

In the three years they’d danced together, Laura Roslin had been short of patience, short of breath, short of time (if only he’d know how short their time would be), but she’d never been short of opinions.

How did Laura do that? How did she just turn off her emotions? Fine, she could forget about him (it wasn’t fine, not by a long shot), but how could she turn her back on the dream she’d chased since she was just four years old?

Years ago, he thought he’d known Laura Roslin as well as one person possibly could know another. Now, he wasn’t so sure if he’d ever known her at all.

He poured himself a tumbler of whiskey - a less generous measure in the glass tonight, despite having a full day off tomorrow to nurse a hangover if necessary. He had better things to do in the morning - get some extra pillows and bedding and maybe a few air mattresses for the boys, call his boss in New York and have a come-to-Jesus conversation about his future with ABT, and check in with Grace to make sure her injury was as minor as he thought.

He smiled as he remembered Grace’s petulant face as she was sprawled out on the marley floor. She was a challenging kid. So much raw material to work with, but completely spoiled as a dancer. Grace’s stubbornness was wearing his patience thin, and poor David was at his wits’ end trying to deal with his primadonna of a partner. He didn’t give a shit if Grace didn’t trust him - Lord knows he’d had plenty of teachers and coaches that he thought didn’t know a jeté from a kick in the balls -, but if she didn’t figure out how to trust David, they’d never make this partnership work. And if Clara and her Nutcracker Prince couldn’t dance together, Jack would rescind his offer, and Bill would be back in that empty townhouse in Hoboken in a job that he had to admit to himself was a dead end.

One problem at a time, he reminded himself. He used to be good at getting people who couldn’t stand each other to figure out how to work together. Common ground, he reminded himself. Sometimes it just took finding that one thing that they shared to make a partnership work. David and Grace were just barely teenagers, still awkward around the opposite sex. Maybe what they needed was to get out of the studio and get to know each other as people. Maybe it was video games, maybe it was a shared hatred of algebra. Maybe they’d figure out that they liked the same books or shitty reality tv shows. Common ground.

For once, the studio was absolutely quiet, the entire company sitting in rapt attention as the greatest dancer of their lifetimes, Mikhail Baryshnikov, rehearsed the role of Don Quixote with his beloved Dulcinea and the dryads. It was nothing short of a miracle that they were all in the room with Misha, given his rather unhappy departure from ABT almost two decades ago. The entire studio was collectively holding its breath rather than interrupt the delicate peace between artist and director. Bill and Laura sat side by side, exhausted from rehearsing Basil and Kitri. Not quite close enough to touch, but close enough that he could smell the delicate fabric softener of her warm ups.

“He’s amazing,” she whispered.

They’d been dancing together for two months at this point, and he could swear that it was the first time that she’d voluntarily initiated a conversation with him. Stung a little that she was talking about someone other than him, but he pushed that thought to the back of his mind. He could play second fiddle to Misha. He didn’t have to like it, but he could do it. Even his ego wasn’t enough to overshadow the greatest dancer of his lifetime.

“I always loved Don Quixote,” he whispered back. “Someday, when I’m old and gray and can’t lift you anymore, this is the role I’m going to do.”

She huffed at the implication that he would someday be unable to lift her. “And what about me? Not a lot of roles for old ladies in ballet. Sexist.”

Leave it to her to bring up that point. “Hey, I didn’t write the book. I just read it.”

She looked at him then, her brow furrowed and her green eyes boring into him. She was looking at him - at him - for the first time in their brief partnership. “You’ve read Don Quixote?” she whispered.

“Yes, Laura,” he drawled. “In addition to counting to eight, I can also read.”

She blushed, embarrassed at the implied insult she’d just casually tossed his way. “I just…I thought I was the only one who read the books.”

He closed the small gap between them, nudging her shoulder with his. “Someday I’ll tell you what I think about Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet.”

She let out a sound that was something between a laugh and a snort. “I hate that play.”

“Nothing romantic about a suicide pact,” he agreed. “Now, King Lear…”

Laura ducked her head into his shoulder, so close to him that he could feel her breath against his skin as she whispered to him. “Is that how you see yourself, the aging king demanding undying love from his daughters? I knew you had an ego, but Bill…that’s just gross.”

He knew her body so well at this point - professionally speaking, of course - but he’d never had the excuse to learn her mind. She was smart, he knew that by the way she danced, by the questions she asked in rehearsals, but he had no idea that she read. Most of the partners he’d had considered the GED a necessary evil. Reading got in the way of rehearsals. He’d misjudged her.

Maybe she’d misjudged him too.

“No, not me. I see you as Cordelia, not giving an inch more than you think is necessary. Stubborn.”

“And coming to a tragic end?” There it was, the smile he’d been trying to worm out of her for months. A real smile, completely unexpected and completely different than the performance smile she pasted on for an audience. It lit her up, so bright that he forgot that it wasn’t just the two of them in the room.

“I can’t see you coming to a tragic end,” he admitted, grinning back at her.

She didn’t answer, just turned her attention back to the rehearsal in front of them. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t pull away from him. For the next hour, he tried to focus on the man who had been a hero to him throughout his dance career, but the only thought that he could settle on was that Laura was leaning against him and seemed content to stay there.

He knew how to lift a partner. He knew how to shift balance onstage. He didn’t know how to let her melt into him as she watched the rehearsal unfolding in front of him.

Bill muttered a silent thanks to Cervantes and the man who chased at windmills, and he promised himself that he’d read a book a day that’s what it took to keep leaning against him in rehearsals with her hair spilling over his shoulder and that smile playing on her lips.

“Someday you’ll have to tell me what other books you like to read,” she said.

“I’ll bring you one tomorrow,” he promised. He ran through his catalogue of books in his mind. Dark Day, she’d like that one. She’d like it, and maybe once she finished it, he could get her out of the studio and onto neutral ground so that they could talk about it. And maybe she’d argue with him, maybe she’d think Prima was too over the top with his prose, but maybe she’d smile at him like that again. Maybe she’d know him a little better after reading it, and maybe she’d trust him a little more.

He couldn’t wait.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, inviting Grace and David out for pizza. Inviting Laura to come along as a chaperone, because he wasn’t stupid enough to think that hauling two teenagers on his own around Philadelphia didn’t seem a little odd for a single man of 40.

David’s parents were fine with it, as long as they knew what time to pick him up. Seemed that they were glad to have him out of their hair as much as possible - in his few years of teaching, he’d never met a more easygoing set of parents. They reminded him of his own mother and father, who’d given him fare for the subway and always seemed surprised when he showed up at home at the end of the night.

Grace, though…he knew Laura wouldn’t let her out of her sight long enough for him to buy them a slice and nudge them into a conversation that didn’t involve a battle with the Mouse King. Laura wasn’t exactly pleased with the idea of a night out, but she went along with it.

Bill knew that it wasn’t his charm that won her over; it was her niece’s wheedling that dragged her out. Maybe his too; he was still very much a visitor to Pennsylvania, and he had no idea where to take the kids. She suggested an old pizza parlor not far from her house and texted him the address.

See you soon, he texted back. No response.

Well, she’d agreed to come out for the night. Maybe that was the best he could hope for.

Bill was born and raised in New York City, and any good city boy knew instantly how to judge a good pizza joint from a bad. This place had all the right ingredients - old wooden booths, red-and-white checked tablecloths, garlic in the air, and a jukebox in the corner of the room.

It smelled authentic. It felt like home, because home still felt like Laura.

Of course she’d pick this place. Years ago, on the one and only trip back to Philadelphia he’d taken with her, she’d brought him here. Her parents had brought here after every show, after Sandra’s softball games, after every straight-A report card that Cheryl had brought home. Years ago, she’d pointed out what was good on the menu, begged a few bucks out of him to put some classic rock on the jukebox, and danced with him, cheek to cheek, to some Journey song that he hardly remembered now.

He could barely stand under the weight of the memories pressing down against his shoulders. That night, when she hummed against his chest, that night when they danced without caring about technique or choreography but just rocked back and forth in each other’s arms, was the night he knew he was going to spend the rest of his life with her.

Here they were again, tucked into the same booth where he’d eaten almost an entire pizza and finished her beer, arguing with the kids about toppings. And David…what the hell? Pineapple on pizza? He had half a mind to boot him out of the show on those grounds alone.

Eventually the kids settled on sausage, mushrooms and onions and a basket of fried appetizers that Bill knew Laura wouldn’t touch. When the pizza came out, Laura slid one slice on her plate, dabbed at the grease with a paper napkin, and picked off every bit of sausage. He reached over to the abandoned sausage and popped a nugget into his mouth.

“Retirement, Laura. Bony elbows.”

She took a big bite of her slice, chewing not because she enjoyed it, but because she wanted to shut him up. She had a pained expression on her face as she finally swallowed.

Some things never changed. She’d still rather die than eat a meal that wasn’t at least 50% vegetables.

Grace and David, with all the innocence of youth, had no such reservations. They demolished half the pizza and the entire basket of fried foods before turning on them, pleading to be released from their company for long enough to choose a few songs from the jukebox. Bill gave them each a five dollar bill and told them that if they chose crap music, he’d fire them himself.

He watched them at the jukebox, skinny elbows shoving each other out of the way as they made their selections. Grace was apparently needling David over his taste in music, and David, for once, had found his voice. Bill laughed as he watched them fight over the buttons of the jukebox, slapping each other’s fingers out of the way. By the looks of it, he should have brought more cash, but at least they were talking to each other. Talking at each other, maybe, but interacting. Close enough.

He looked back at Laura, and his laughter died. She was watching the two of them warily, completely on guard. Watching to see if she needed to intercede.

Ten years ago he had to fight to break down her barriers, but now he had to dig through the layers of Laura the parent to try and find the small nugget of Laura the dancer, Laura the reader, Laura the person that still lived underneath.

“Stop worrying,” he admonished. “They’re fine.”

They were more than fine. They were having fun, stuffed with pizza, arguing over selections on the jukebox. Grace was having a blast, and even David had loosened up enough to laugh at her terrible taste in music. Common ground - two teenagers having a good time outside of school and the studio, arguing about classic rock versus Justin Bieber. Whoever the hell that was.

Bill sat back in the uncomfortable booth, well pleased with himself about putting the two kids together. Grace’s ankle was nearly back to 100 percent, and he’d have them back in the studio, ready to work, the next afternoon.

“She’s a good kid,” Bill said. “Pain in my ass, but a good kid.”

“She is,” Laura said. “I’m lucky to have her.”

“She’s lucky to have you,” he answered automatically.

Laura shrugged. “Luckier to have her parents. But I do what I can.”

“What you can? You gave up your entire life for her.” He didn’t mean to say it, even if he thought it every day that he was in Philadelphia. She didn’t need him weighing in on her life, making her feel guilty for walking out on him in favor of a six-year-old girl who was in intensive care.

She didn’t respond, just hummed and looked over her shoulder at the kids.

She didn’t need him to make her feel guilty, but maybe she needed someone to remind her that what she’d done for Grace went above and beyond the call of duty. “Laura? You gave up your entire life.”

All of a sudden, her half-eaten slice of pizza was terribly interesting. She picked at the toppings, digging out the wilted mushrooms and poking at the congealed cheese. “Fair trade,” she said.

“For what?”

Laura shrugged. “For what she lost.”

Fair trade? For what Grace lost? Laura didn’t look at him, just kept her eyes focused on the grease-stained napkins in front of her.

He was reminded of his shoulder surgery, and the nights that she’d skipped out on happy hour and dinner with friends to stay home and nurse him back to health. He was reminded of the rehearsals when she was a newly promoted soloist, when he’d barely taken notice of her, but still paid enough attention to see her waiting around to help the apprentices and the first-year corps dancers with their missteps in rehearsal. She had given up so much of her time for other people, a habit that he’d fought long and hard to break.

Did he break it at all, or did she just turn her attention from them to him? And then from him to Grace? “Laura, you’re not responsible for what she lost.”

“Aren’t I?”

Jesus, no wonder she always looked so tired and sad. “No, Laura, you’re not.”

“They wouldn’t have been in that car if it weren’t for us. Grace would have her parents and she would have her grandparents.”

“Laura…is that why you’re punishing yourself?”

Laura’s eyes grew wide and her shoulders shot up to her ears. He should have kept his mouth shut.

“Punishing myself?” He shivered a bit when she turned the full force of her anger on him, but he wasn’t going to take back his words.

“Punishing yourself. Laura, you didn’t cause the accident. You didn’t cause the snowstorm. You didn’t force your parents and sisters to come see you perform. They wanted to see you. Don’t you know how proud of you they were?”

She didn’t, obviously. He thought he knew how hard it was for her, losing her parents and sisters, but he had no idea that she was carrying all that guilt on herself. Grace and David were dancing around the jukebox, delighted in some selection that sounded like dying cats to him, but Laura was fighting back tears over a night that she hadn’t been able to control eight years ago. He was an ass for bringing it up all over again

He was even more of an ass for not dropping everything and dragging her and Grace out of Philadelphia eight years ago.

They could have brought Grace back to New York. They could have found a way to raise her and still be together. Instead, he’d left her here to blame herself, and blame him by extension, while he looked to Carolanne to ease his broken heart. By leaving her here, and marrying Carolanne, he’d earned her blame. He’d carry that guilt, but he wouldn’t let her do the same. Not this time.

“Your parents wanted you to go to New York. Your sisters wanted you to dance. Do you really think that they’d be angry with you for living your dream?”

This wasn’t what he’d expected from this night. He’d hoped that Grace and David would find some common ground, that he and Laura could be in the same room without wanting to hide from each other or kill each other. It would have been enough for him to see her relax in his presence, but right now, she was about three breaths from falling apart. And he hated himself for putting her in that position. Again.

He slid out of the seat across from her and eased along the red vinyl next to her, close enough that he could pull her next to him and rest his hand against her head, tucking it just a little bit closer against him. “Laura, you don’t have to feel guilty for living your dream. I met your parents, and they were so proud of you.”

He pulled her just a little bit closer and kissed her forehead. “They were so proud of you.” He kissed her cheeks, salty with tears. “Laura, they were so proud of you.”

She eased her arms around his waist, but she was still fighting the comfort he offered. Still, she was desperate for someone, anyone, to let her off the hook. “Cheryl and Sandra,” she said, but her words were muffled against his neck.

“Loved you,” he answered. “Idolized you.” He pulled her a little bit closer. “If it were you in that car,” and the words caught in his throat, because he couldn’t bear to think of it, let alone say it, “if it were you, would you want them to blame themselves?”

Of course she wouldn’t, but she was the big sister. He thought of Lee, tugging Zak through their house on unsteady hands, guiding his little brother on stubbly legs past furniture and tiptoeing over the shoes Bill had left in the hallway. Laura must have done the same with her sisters, years ago, in that house he’d seen only once.

He’d only been to their house once, but he’d played host to Cheryl and Sandra a few times, and he had no doubt that they adored their big sister. They’d followed her around the apartment, into the studio, and waited in the wings of the stage while Laura danced. He’d come home one night to find Cheryl curled up against Laura, a sleeping baby Grace tucked between them, and draped a blanket around them. The next morning, Laura had told him that Cheryl was terrified about being so young and having a completely unplanned baby. Laura told him that she had reassured Cheryl that they were Roslins, that they were tough, that Cheryl was more than up to the task of parenting the little girl.

Cheryl and Grace had gone home that night, and Bill had held Laura while she cried and second-guessed herself for sending her sister back to Pennsylvania.

She was still second-guessing herself, and he was still trying to find a way to make what happened ok for Grace. Bill was still struggling to find the right words to keep Laura from blaming herself. Back then, it was kisses and whispers and legs tangled in their bed. Now, it was… he didn’t even know what it was. He just knew that he needed to hold her.

“She loved you,” he murmured into her hair. “She loved you, and your parents loved you, and I loved you.”

Too much.

Too much, but it was true. He loved her then, and he loved her still. He loved her stubbornness, and he loved her fire, and he loved her determination. He loved everything about her. He should have pushed her out of his mind after eight years, but her body pressed against his, her head leaning against his shoulder, her uneven breaths burning patterns against his neck…he loved her.

He loved her enough to pull back just enough to brush her hair away from her face. Enough to trace a finger on her cheek, enough to tip her jaw up to see her niece laughing with David across the restaurant. Enough to reassure her that he was here for her, whatever that meant.

“She’s happy, Laura. You’ve done good. So stop with the tears.”

She wiped her hands across her face and sat back against the beat-up vinyl. Whatever moment they’d shared was gone, and he liked to think he knew her well enough to give her a little bit of space. He eased himself out of the booth and dug out his wallet. “Kids need a few more bucks at the jukebox.”

She grabbed his wrist and tugged him back down to her. He willingly followed, happy to feel her hand on his skin, happy to rest his forehead against hers.. “Play some Journey,” she said. “For me.”

For her, he’d do anything.


	5. Chapter 5

Bill stared at the phone resting on his kitchen counter, trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to call Laura. On the one hand, she had to be mentally drained from last night’s conversation; on the other hand, maybe being drained from last night’s conversation meant that she’d appreciate a distraction. Maybe not a distraction from _him,_ but a distraction nonetheless.

He wouldn’t push her, he promised himself. He’d merely make the offer. If she wanted to do it, she would. If she wanted to see him, she would.

He wasn’t offering anything other than friendship, and the chance to get back into the world that he refused to believe she didn’t miss. At least, he wasn’t offering more right now. If the time came that they moved past friendship into something more, well, that was just fine with him. He wasn’t going to beg for it and he wasn’t going to try to force her into it. He was just going to give her a friendly nudge in what he hoped was the right direction.

He smiled a little bit at the idea. Friends with Laura. They’d been strangers, then adversaries, then reluctant partners, then lovers. He’d never actually considered her a friend before, but now that he was rolling the word around in his mind, it had a nice ring to it. _Friends._

He could be her friend. He wanted her to be his.

Decision made, Bill picked up the phone and tapped a few buttons to redial her number.

“Hey. You busy today? You owe me for buying pizza last night, and I need a favor. And, just so you know, you’re not going to like it.”

***

She had a class to teach at 10, and Grace needed her lunch packed, so she smacked the button to silence her alarm, heaved herself out of bed and headed for the shower. A quick look in the mirror - dark circles and stained teeth - told her that she was definitely a little worse for the wear from last night.

It had seemed like a good idea to confide in Bill, to really talk to someone, after a slice of pizza and a pint of light beer. Seemed like less of a good idea when she got home alone and sat on the couch with a bottle of pinot noir and a box of kleenex, replaying their conversation over and over again.

Was she punishing herself? Bill certainly seemed to think so. She twisted the knobs in the bathtub and stepped underneath a spray that was just a little too hot, trying to steam out the red wine hangover and trying to scrub out her regrets with floral body wash and a net sponge. As her skin turned from ivory to bright red, she realized that punishing herself wasn’t exactly a new trick. She shut off the taps and wrapped herself in a fluffy towel, ignoring the bright red streaks on her arms and legs where she’d scrubbed enough to anger her skin.

Laura was twisting her thick hair up into a bun when the phone rang, and the shrill ringtone startled her so much that she knocked her water glass off the bathroom counter and right onto her foot. It was going to be _that_ kind of day.

“Dammit! Hello?” she snapped.

Bill. Of course it would be Bill. She raised her eyebrow at the sound of his voice, and the other eyebrow shot up to join the first when he warned her that he was going to be asking her to do something she wasn’t going to like. God help her if he wanted her to sit down and rehash more painful topics. She didn’t have enough wine or a strong enough liver to get through another night like last night.

“I will concede that I owe you a favor, Mr. Adama, but I refuse to agree to anything blindly.”

He sighed, but she could hear the grin hiding underneath his dramatic show of exasperation. “You refuse a lot of things, lady. Maybe you should say yes sometimes and see what happens.”

 _Funny._ Well, thank God he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. “All right, yes. Yes, I refuse your favor.” She paused for a second, then continued in her most chipper yoga teacher voice, “Well, would you look at that. I said yes, and just like that, I have you out of my hair for the rest of the day. You were right, Bill. I am going to say yes more often.”

This time the sigh wasn’t just for show, and she choked back a snicker at his obvious irritation. “Hear me out,” he said. “Can you at least say yes to that?”

She looked at her watch, then at her mottled skin. She needed at least another 15 minutes to make herself look presentable, then a good ten or so to get Grace out of bed, five to throw together a lunch, and a good half hour to follow Grace around the upstairs bathroom and her bedroom and generally annoy her into being on time to leave the house. That didn’t leave much time for listening to Bill’s proposal.

“You have three minutes, Bill, then I’m hanging up on you and not answering your calls until at least tomorrow. Possibly later, depending on what you’re planning to ask.”

He paused long enough to cut into a precious six seconds of his time, and Laura knew he was debating whether or not to make an inappropriate comment. Eight years ago, he wouldn’t have hesitated.

Eight years ago, she would have egged him on. Today, she was fully prepared to hang up on him.

"Jack has a late lunch today. Some sort of Philly bigwigs that need their asses kissed extra hard to cough up money for the spring season, so he can’t take the Flowers rehearsal from 1-4. He asked me to do it, but…Laura, I gotta be honest with you. I don’t give a shit about the Flowers variation, but I know you always liked that one. And I know you know the choreography and the timing of the music better than probably anyone in this city, so what do you say? Help an old friend out and join me for the rehearsal?”

It was her turn to let an awkward silence stretch between them. Her old friend Bill? Is that what they were now? Better that than her old ex whose heart she broke, she admitted silently to herself. Better than the ghost from her past who wanted her to relive things she couldn’t face.

Better to give him an inch, before he took another eight years. “I’ll agree, on one condition.”

“Of course there’s a condition.”

She snorted at that but opted to ignore the comment. “You have to promise me that Jack knows nothing about this favor and will know nothing about this favor. I’m serious, Bill. I do not want to work for the Pennsylvania Ballet.”

“I can promise you that he won’t hear about it from me.”

“In that case, you have a deal.” She agreed to meet him in the early afternoon and clicked the button on the phone to end the call. Her morning beginning yoga class would go on as scheduled, but she had to call Tory to take over the afternoon classes.

Tory was going to be pissed. Well, Tory had been pissed at Laura for one reason or another for the better part of the last three years, so one more day wasn’t going to hurt anything. She tapped on the phone and started reorganizing her schedule.

Seven hours later, Grace was tucked into a corner of the studio with her homework, and Laura and Bill were walking through the paces of the Waltz of the Flowers. Bill wasn’t wrong, she hated to admit - the Flowers was her favorite variation in the Nutcracker. The corps dancers were red-faced and sweating, panting for breath after running through the intense 12-minute piece three times in a row. A few of the younger dancers looked a little green around the gills. Something that the glowing reviews never mentioned in ballet - occasionally, the dancers suffered for their art, and the stage managers suffered even more by throwing out trash cans filled with vomit.

Better to push them now and get them ready to handle the intensely aerobic variation than to watch them shove each other out of the way in the wings during opening night. Not that she would be watching - she’d be in her seat in the audience, pretending that she had no idea about the blood, sweat and stomach cramps that went into the performance.

Still, she was here to help, so while Bill yelled at them about holding their positions and hitting their marks, she pulled some of the younger dancers aside and walked them - very, very slowly - through their choreography. She corrected mismatched arms, shifted positions and counted very deliberately over the music until the dancers each entered the stage precisely on the proper note. Through it all, she had to fight to keep from casting a glance over her shoulder at Bill. Bill, who was dressed in all black, standing in front of the studio with his arms crossed. Bill, who had never given a tinker’s damn about the right way to do things, but was keeping his mouth shut as she advised the corps to tuck in their abs, stretch through their fingers, and watch each other as they renverséd.

By the start of the third hour of rehearsal, she realized that Bill was doing little more than controlling the music playing through the studio’s stereo system or gesturing to the dancers to take the marks that Laura indicated. Even Grace had perked up, abandoning her algebra book in favor of watching Laura work through the geometry and physics of a professional performance.

She’d rather die than admit it, but this was the most fun she’d had in years. Teaching soccer moms the proper position for downward dog didn’t compare to this. Juggling schedules and doing laundry for Grace didn’t compare to this. She missed dancing onstage, absolutely, but working her way through the variation, correcting a misplaced foot or showing young dancers how to judge their spacing without relying on the mirrors…she loved it. Breaking down the intricacy of a challenging block of choreography into its most simple component parts, and watching the dancers figure out how to put them all back together…she loved that too.

Most of all, she loved that Bill just stood there, pausing and playing the music, and let her completely take over his rehearsal.

 _Maybe there’s something for me here._ She tried to quash the thought, but it wouldn’t go away. It just echoed, louder and louder in her head, until she couldn’t hear the music above the thoughts ringing in her ears.

She caught a glimpse of the clock out of the corner of her eye. Five minutes before 4pm, five minutes before Bill would be back in a smaller studio with Grace and David and the kid who played Fritz. Three hours had flown by, and she still had so much to do. The third group was struggling to keep their spacing, and Sharon Agathon, the Dewdrop Fairy, was still not maintaining her spacing in her sequence of fouettés.

Then again, maybe it was better to quit while she was ahead. Sharon’s husband Karl seemed to have fond memories of their time together at ABT, but Sharon still looked at her like Laura was just waiting for the right time to throw her under a crosstown bus. Old grudges died hard, if they died at all.

Still, Sharon was sloppy with her arms. She’d make a note of it and pass it on to Bill, and then go about her business. She took a step back and nodded to Bill, passing off the final five minutes of rehearsal to him while she gathered her thoughts. He reminded the corps dancers to take corrections to heart and released them to whatever else their schedules held until their long Nutcracker day was done at 7pm.

She had big plans to find a coffee shop and nurse a soy latte and scone while Grace was in rehearsal, but as Grace shoved her books and her phone in the bag Laura held open for her, Laura felt someone’s eyes burning into the back of her head. Turning toward the door of the studio, she caught a glimpse of Jack’s white hair hovering over the dancers who were shoving their way out.

 _Dammit._ They’d had a deal, and he’d broken it. She shot a glare at Bill, and he shrugged.

She was going to kill him, just as soon as she had a second alone with him. He pointed at Grace, then at the door. Message received. She wouldn’t get the chance to kill him until after Grace’s rehearsal. Very well, she could wait. Laura shoved Grace along, reminding her niece to call her when rehearsal was done. She’d deal with Bill after she had a few hours to herself with her coffee and her irritation. 

She was halfway out the building’s front door when Jack called her back. She debated pretending not to hear him. Knowing Jack, though, she had no doubt he’d follow her down the street and ruin a perfectly good soy latte. She straightened her shoulders and turned.

“Don’t you have a rehearsal or something?”

“Or something. Perks of being the boss…people wait for me, not the other way around.” Jack waved toward his office. “Come with me.”

 _Dammit._ She was going to kill Bill. She followed Jack, dragging her feet as much as her dignity would allow.

She settled into the chair across from him, meticulously arranging her purse at her feet and her coat across her lap. She smoothed her hair, tucking it behind her ears, and then, finally running out of ways to avoid looking at him, she folded her hands over her coat and met his eyes.

“You finished?” he said with a raise of his eyebrows.

She nodded primly. “Yes.”

“Good. Then I want you to tell me what you know about insurance.”

Insurance? She repeated the word in confusion. He wanted to talk about insurance? She knew a hell of a lot about insurance, particularly life insurance, health insurance, and disability insurance, but she didn’t think that Jack of all people needed the particulars on any of those things. Longing glances to the unopened pack of cigarettes on his desk aside, he looked healthy enough to her.

“Yes. insurance. Like say, if you owned a yoga studio, and you had a stranger come in and lead a class, wouldn’t you be concerned about liability insurance if she did something that injured one of your students?”

 _Ah, that kind of insurance._ “I wasn’t-”

Jack held up his hand. “You were. And if you’re going to be in my studio, working with my dancers, you’re going to fill out some paperwork and you’re going on my payroll.”

She pressed her lips together and took a deep breath. “I don’t want to work for you, Jack.”

“You already are working for me, Laura. And very well, I might add, but you’re going to do it according to my rules. And on my insurance policy.”

She pushed herself out of the chair and started gathering her belongings. “It won’t happen again.”

“Dammit!” Jack slammed his hand against his desk, making Laura jump in surprise and drop her purse. “It will happen again, because you like doing it, and if you’d just stop being so fucking stubborn, you could keep on liking doing it and GET PAID FOR IT.”

Her mouth hung open at his outburst, and he finally cracked a smile at her complete astonishment. “Ask my assistant for the adjunct paperwork and have it filled out and on my desk before you leave tonight. As for your schedule, I’ll leave that up to my associate artistic director to determine.”

“Your associate…”

“New guy. Bill Adama. Kind of an asshole, but I think you’ll like him. Now,” he said, as he headed toward his office door, “if you’ll excuse me, I have better things to do with my time than argue with an employee.”

She followed him out the door, still a little shocked and confused. He stopped at his assistant’s desk and muttered a few words to her, then turned back to Laura. “On my desk before you leave.”

She took the packet of papers his assistant held out to her with a vague smile and nod. She was definitely, definitely going to kill Bill Adama.

Once the paperwork was done and dutifully dropped on Jack’s desk, she had nothing to do but pace and stew. If there was one thing she absolutely hated, it was being backed into a corner, and here she was, completely trapped by Bill and Jack. By the time Grace and her fellow dancers came laughing out of the studio, she had worked herself into a full, raging temper. She shoved her way into the studio and slammed her purse and coat onto a chair.

“We had a deal, jackass!” she shouted.

Bill, to her frustration, barely reacted to the animosity in her tone. “We did,” he agreed mildly. “I told you Jack would never hear it from me that you were here. And he didn’t. I never promised that he wouldn’t _see_ you here.”

“I. Do. Not. Want. To. Work. Here.” she hissed through clenched teeth.

“Then don’t,” he said with a shrug. “Nobody’s forcing you to be here.”

“Oh, Laura, please do me a favor. Oh, Laura, I need your help with the Flowers,” she mimicked in a singsong. “What do you call that?”

“A request. Which you agreed to. I didn’t force you, or blackmail you.”

She wasn’t sure she’d agree that he hadn’t blackmailed her, but his reasonable argument did take a little of the wind out of her sails. “Why is it so hard to understand that I don’t want to be a part of this anymore?” she asked, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice.

“Why is it so hard to understand that you do want to be a part of this? It’s _The Nutcracker,_ Laura, not the end of the world. You like _The Nutcracker._ ” She snorted at that, and he fought back a chuckle as he continued. “Ok, you don’t hate _The Nutcracker_. You like teaching. You like being annoyingly precise about technique and proper terminology. You like being in the studio. Tell me, what about all of this is such a great tragedy to you?”

She collapsed on the marley floor of the studio and absently rubbed at one of the streaks left behind during rehearsal. “It’s just…Bill, it’s so _hard._ ” She winced at the petulance in her voice. God, she sounded just like Grace when she was asked to finish her science homework.

Bill settled next to her and nudged her with his shoulder. “This isn’t hard. What you’ve been through, that was hard. Raising a kid, that’s hard. This is the easiest thing in the world, if you’ll just let it be.”

She wasn’t sure if they were still talking about ballet, and she was too afraid to dig into it deeper. Laura gave him a thin smile. “You think it’s easy now. Keep in mind, you’re the one Jack wants to be in charge of my schedule.”

“Is that all? Lady, you already do everything I say, the first time I ask. Easiest damn job I ever had.”

She smacked him lightly on the arm, then settled in against him, taking a little bit of comfort from his solid warmth. “I don’t know how to do this again, Bill.” This time, she was positive she wasn’t just talking about ballet.

“Stick with what you know, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go along.”

“That’s it?”

His face lit up as he grinned at her. “That’s it. It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?”

As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t argue. They were here, working together and making progress. He was smiling at her, and she no longer wanted to wrap one of Grace’s leg warmers around his throat and strangle him. “I’m not taking the Mother Ginger rehearsals, I can tell you that right now.”

He pushed himself off the floor, dusted off his pants, and reached out to help her up. He held her hands just a second too long. “We’ll discuss that later.”

“I’m not taking that stupid Mother Ginger rehearsal!” she shouted after him, and she could hear him laughing as he made his way out of the studio and down the hallway.


	6. Chapter 6

Two weeks and several panicked late-night calls to Bill later, she was finally feeling something that resembled comfortable in her new job. She’d called him after she finished the first rehearsal for Spanish, terrified that she wasn’t up to the job.

“Did they quit?” he asked.

No, but she almost did, halfway through the rehearsal when the word for penche completely escaped her brain. She couldn’t remember the French terminology that had been drilled into her head since she was five years old; how could she expect to lead a rehearsal?

He reassured her that she was doing fine, that if there were a problem, Jack would definitely toss her out on her ass the next day. It shouldn’t have been comforting, the promise that she could be fired in an instant, but it was.

She made it through the second Spanish rehearsal without incident and called him to thank him for being the voice of reason. Imagine that, Bill Adama being the voice of reason, after all these years.

“It’s like riding a bike,” he’d said. “Some things you don’t forget.”

She was pretty sure that if she got on a bike right now, she’d fall flat on her ass, but she didn’t argue the point. She was just happy to talk to him, to share every minute detail of her rehearsal, to ask his advice and let him praise her in return. _Some things you don’t forget._

She wished she’d forgotten how good he was at making her feel better. She wished she’d forgotten how the sound of his voice at the end of a long day made her sigh with relief.

Years ago, she’d been afraid to lean on him, to ask him for advice, because she was afraid he’d think her weak. Now, he was the person she wanted to tell her that she was doing the right thing. She hated giving up that much control to him, but she had to admit…she trusted him to tell her if she was screwing it up completely. Bill had never let her down easy, as much as she’d wanted him to 11 years ago when they were just starting out as partners. If she was making a mess out of the show, he’d tell her, in no uncertain terms.

He talked her through the doubts that she was capable of handling a strict rehearsal schedule. He made detailed notes on the variations she was teaching, and he told her to suck it up and act like an adult when she threatened to quit because it was just so _hard_ to be back in the studio.

It was hard, but it was also the easiest thing she’d ever done. She felt like a fraud teaching yoga, but cleaning up a variation for _The Nutcracker_ …it was what she was born to do. The choreography lived in her body, as much as she tried to push it away, and her complaints about it being hard rang hollow in her ears during those late night phone calls.

“Suck it up and be an adult,” he said. 35 years old, and she was still struggling to be an adult. Still trying to find her place in the world, while calling her ex at midnight and begging him to make her feel better. _Jesus, she was pathetic._

***

Be an adult. It seemed like rational advice when she was tucked in her bed and threatening to stay there until January, but less so when she was knee-deep in kids, trying to wrangle a bunch of hyperactive 8-year-olds into hitting their marks for the godforsaken Mother Ginger variation she swore she wouldn’t rehearse.

“Don’t let them see you sweat,” he’d said. She wasn’t so much sweating as she was on the verge of killing someone. Preferably Bill Adama, but Jack Cottle would do just as well, and a couple of these kids were also looking like damn fine candidates for her wrath.

She hated everything about this piece - the music, the kitsch, the costumes, the choreography. Mostly, she hated that she’d always been forced to play one of the boys because she was one of the few children in her classes who wouldn’t complain about the role she was given.

Bill gave her a wave as he snuck out of the studio, and she fought to keep from cursing him under her breath. She’d agreed to it, because 20-plus years later, she was still taking her assignments without complaining.

Well, without complaining _much_. She’d dug in her heels over this stupid rehearsal, right until Bill told her that he needed someone to cover it because he had to be home to meet his ex-wife when she dropped off his boys for the weekend.

She could suck it up for two hours, if it meant Bill got to spend that time with his children. He had Jack covering his rehearsals for the weekend, and even Karl had stepped up to take over the party rehearsal on Sunday morning.

Say what she would about Bill, and she had plenty to say about him over the last two weeks, but there was no denying that he inspired a certain unwavering loyalty among the company.

She was surrounded by the evidence of that in the form of sixteen children who had absolutely no interest in letting her herd them through the variation. She’d watched him leading rehearsal on Wednesday night to make sure she was up to speed, and she was more than a little charmed by how good he was with the kids. As brusque and rude as he could be with Jack and the company dancers (and with her), he was endlessly patient with the kids.

Watching him kneel on the studio floor to reason with a temperamental grade-schooler made her want to see him with his own kids. Lee and Zak were still young - did they still look at their dad with hero worship? Did they look like him, or talk like him? Did they fight with each other, the way she had with her sisters? Did they miss their dad?

_“You must miss them,” she said, after she begrudgingly agreed to take on the damn Mother Ginger rehearsal._

__

__

“Every day.”

“And do you miss…” She stopped herself. It wasn’t her place to ask, and she didn’t want to know the answer.

He raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to finish the sentence.

“Do you miss New York?”

Bill was many things, but stupid never one one of them. He knew damn well what she wanted to ask. Did he miss his wife? Did he miss his life?

_“New York is great, but I don’t miss it.” He shrugged. “Home isn’t always a place, you know?”_

Home was the house where she was raised, where she was raising Grace. Home was Philadelphia. Home was the scuffs on the kitchen table and the marks in the doorway where her father measured his girls at the start of each school year.

She’d spent the last eight years of her life trying to build a home for Grace. What was home if it wasn’t four walls and a roof?

She took a deep breath and released it slowly, grateful for her countless hours of yoga training. She’d need all the namaste she could call up to get through this rehearsal. A few kids in this variation, she’d be more than happy to knock them into corpse pose and let them stay there until she could make her escape from the building.

As bad as teaching yoga was, it was nothing compared to this live-action _Lord of the Flies_. It was probably for the best that she’d never had kids of her own. She took another deep breath and recued the music.

Long days didn’t bother her. Years of ballet conditioned her to see exhaustion as a temporary issue, not a chronic problem. Tonight, though, she was bone weary. Two hours with Mother Ginger, another two hours waiting for Grace and David to finish their rehearsal with Jack, and all the while she was counting down the minutes until she could go home, have a glass of wine and drown herself in a lavendar-scented bath. Grace was still on a rehearsal high when they finally made it into the house, and as much as she wanted to be that responsible adult and cook a balanced meal for Grace, she was also smart enough to know her limits. She ordered Chinese food, pressed a few bills into Grace’s hand for the delivery and ducked into her bathroom with a glass of wine that was dangerously close to overflowing. Chow mein and sauteed eggplant could wait.

She was halfway through a glass of a delightful Russian River Chardonnay and a 90s playlist when her phone chirped. Expecting a text from Grace about dinner, she opened one eye and held up the phone.

Bill.

_Going to the Please Touch Museum tomorrow with the boys. Interested?_

Something about the bath and the wine and the candles she’d lit sent her mind in a direction that was most decidedly not child-friendly. Please touch, indeed, she wanted to reply. But the wine was soothing her nerves, she did want to meet Bill’s kids, and she had a few free hours in the afternoon. Grace had always loved that museum. Why not? She took a deep swig from her glass and tapped on her phone.

_Rehearsal at 10. After lunch?_

The little text bubbles appeared almost immediately Before she could take another sip from her almost-empty glass, his reply popped up on her screen.

_1pm. It’s a date._

It most certainly was _not_ a date, because they did not date. It was two old friends taking their kids to a museum. She was too tired to argue the point, so she tapped out a reply that she’d meet him there.

Bill Adama with his kids. Years ago, she’d dreamed about seeing him with his kids, her kids. Their kids. Now, she was just curious.

Curious. That’s all. Just curious. Just friends. Just curious, just friends, just friends. Just…wished she had another glass of wine.

She settled back in the tub and banished all thoughts of Bill, all thoughts of ballet, all thoughts of rehearsal. In the quiet of the bathroom, she mentally reread a book from years ago. She was halfway through imagining the plot before she remembered where she’d gotten the book in the first place.

Dammit, Bill Adama.

***

The last time Bill remembered being this nervous, he was staring down a three-day-old infant with an incredibly ripe diaper.

That baby was now refusing to hold his hand, no matter how many times he reminded Lee about the rules about being out in a big, crowded public space like this, and that baby was still looking at him like he wasn’t quite up to the job of being a father. Zak was perfectly happy to clutch his leg and watch the world go by with his big brown eyes, but Lee was getting more and more impatient by the second. There were things to be seen and touched, questions to be answered, and Lee was having a hard time understanding why they were just standing there on the stone steps of the museum.

 _Because I want to impress Laura._ Some things shouldn’t be shared with his six-year-old son.

Lee might not understand why they were waiting, but Bill had a pretty good idea. Once the boys went back to their mother, he was going to have to have another talk with Grace about being respectful about other people’s schedules.

He was about to give up and take the boys inside when he saw them, long legs and red-gold hair running down the sidewalk. Grace, fully healed from her injury, was leading the charge down the sidewalk, but Laura was just a few steps behind.

He recognized the look on her face, irritation mixed with resignation. Grace had already gotten one lecture and would get another later, he was sure of it. Lord knows he’d heard it from Laura enough in the past to cringe a little at the firm set of her jaw.

He missed that look. That _what were you thinking?_ look, usually accompanied by crossed arms and tapping feet. Sometimes an eyeroll, sometimes a huff, sometimes no reaction other than her stalking down the hall and slamming their bedroom door behind her.

Sometimes all of the above, but usually…usually she stared him down until he could come up with an answer that sounded at least a little reasonable, and he’d plead his case and kiss her senseless, and she’d forgive him.

Maybe he needed to give Grace some tips about throwing herself on her aunt’s mercy. It probably wouldn’t do him any favors in the long run, but at the moment, he couldn’t stop a chuckle at how clearly angry she was.

“I’m so sorry we’re late,” Laura huffed as they came skidding to a halt in front of him.

He grabbed her by the waist, intent on stopping her forward momentum before she could knock them both over. “Not a problem,” he said, giving her a light squeeze. “We’ve got all afternoon.”

She smiled and took another deep breath, but before she could say anything else, a small voice interrupted them.

“Who are you?”

Bill laughed. Lee was nothing if not blunt. “Lee, this is my friend Laura and her niece, Grace. Laura, Grace, this is Lee, and,” he paused to pull Zak from where he was hiding behind his father, “this is Zak. They can't wait to go into the museum.”

“Well,” Laura said brightly, “we shouldn’t keep you waiting. Are you excited?”

“I was excited an hour ago,” Lee replied with a world-weary sigh. Bill fought back a laugh at his son. Where did he come from? Both Bill and Lee’s mother were passionate, argumentative and more than a little quick to fly off the handle. Lee, though…Lee took in every situation with the same grim determination as a 90-year-old war vet who’d seen it all and no longer cared as long as he had a good meal and a comfortable bed at the end of the day.

 _He’s_ just like my father, Bill realized. The thought tugged at his chest and at his conscience. He and his dad didn’t get along, never had, but he should still call the old man. Tomorrow, maybe, he’d put the boys on the phone with his parents. In the meantime, he had an afternoon planned, and they were already running behind schedule. “Well, then, we won’t make you wait any longer,” he said. He held his hand out to his oldest son, but Lee had apparently forgotten all about him.

“We have to hold hands in crowded places,” Lee said and grasped Laura’s hand in his own. “Come on,” he said with a tug. She let him drag her up the steps to the museum doors without a backward glance.

Zak, always one to follow in his big brother’s footsteps, took hold of Grace’s hand and followed along, leaving Bill standing by himself. He’d planned this outing for the five of them, and they’d collectively ditched him on the sidewalk. He tried to be annoyed at how quickly his sons had abandoned him for two beautiful women, but he couldn’t stop a chuckle as he watched them disappear through the doors of the museum. Maybe his sons took after him more than he thought.

Zak bounced from exhibit to exhibit, poking and prodding at things, turning back to make sure that Grace was still with him before running along to the next. Lee, though, took his time, struggling to read through the description at each display, turning to Laura to help him with words that were beyond his grasp. She walked him through big words and answered the endless questions he asked about each exhibit. Laura held her own in the Wonderland exhibit and the Philadelphia cityscape, but she looked at him with pleading eyes when Lee started asking about the space station.

He knew his son, and he’d come prepared. Bill had done his homework on the space station exhibit and answered Lee’s questions about atmosphere and gravity and space travel as best he could. _Thank God for Google,_ he muttered to himself. When Lee asked questions that three hours of internet research couldn’t answer, he set his son loose on a museum volunteer. When the kid looked up at him with a terrified expression, Bill felt the tiniest bit guilty, but the volunteer signed up for this gig and Zak was starting to whine about being hungry. Three hours had gone by; Lee could stay until the museum closed and not be done, but Zak was at the point where he needed food and a nap, or else there would be a meltdown.

He’d promised Carolanne he wouldn’t exhaust the boys; more to the point, he didn’t want Laura to think that he wasn’t capable of keeping up with his sons’ needs. He cut into Lee’s conversation with the volunteer and told him that he could ask two more questions.

Lee being Lee, he negotiated his father up to four questions. Bill looked up to see how Zak was doing - his youngest had his little arm curled around Laura’s legs, and she was absently stroking her fingers through his hair as she chatted with Grace. Four questions it was.

“Only four. Choose wisely.”

Sage advice. He wished someone had given it to him eight years ago.

He promised Carolanne he wouldn’t exhaust the boys, and he’d also promised her that he’d feed them something other than pizza and cheesesteaks. Laura pointed him to a small cafe down the street that had a kid-friendly menu, so the five of them squeezed into a booth and shared a pitcher of Coke. (He never promised Carolanne anything about soda, even though he knew he’d regret it in a few hours when the boys were still riding a caffeine and sugar high.) Laura did the ordering, salads for the adults and Grace, sandwiches and carrot sticks for the boys. She teased Zak about not eating the crusts, pushed tomatoes off of her salad so that Lee could dip them in ranch dressing and polish them off, and raised a practiced eyebrow when Grace announced that she was in performance mode and couldn’t possibly finish her meal.

“She doesn’t want you to see her eating,” she whispered to Bill. “She’s afraid you’ll think she’s going to get fat.”

If there was one thing that Bill never needed to hear again, it was a dancer complaining about getting fat. “Eat your salad. All of it. You’re no good to me if you pass out because you’re hungry.” He tossed a piece of bread onto her plate. “And eat that too.”

Grace wrinkled her nose at him. “Carbs?”

“Delicious carbs.” He took a bite of the chunk of bread on his plate. “Even better with butter.”

She snorted, but she picked up the offending piece of sourdough and took a bite. “Happy now?”

“Yes,” he agreed. He met Laura’s eyes and saw the relief shining there. Two can play this game. He looked down at Laura’s half-finished salad. “Bony elbows,” he reminded her.

She plucked the half-eaten piece of bread off his plate and polished it off. “Happy now?” she repeated with a grin after she swallowed.

Happy didn’t even begin to cover it. “It’s a start.”

***

The boys were sacked out on his bed by 9pm, but Bill was wide awake. After leaving Laura and Grace in the early evening, he’d brought the boys home and played six rounds of Go Fish, and his pride was more than a little dented that he’d lost to Lee five of the six rounds. He’d read them two stories, talked to them about what they wanted to be when they grew up and promised them he’d take them to the studio in the morning to watch a rehearsal before Zak and then Lee had finally nodded off. Now, he was absently wiping down the counters in his kitchen, going over and over the day in his head.

Did it make him a bad father that his thoughts kept getting caught up in Laura?

 _No more than it made you a bad husband_ , he could hear Carolanne whisper in his mind, and he had to concede the point to his imaginary ex-wife. He’d been a shitty husband, but at least now he could see that. Someday, maybe, he’d be brave enough to apologize to her.

Someday, but not today. Carolanne wasn’t stupid; she knew full well what was keeping him in Philadelphia, and it wasn’t the job. He’d hear about it when the boys went home and told their mother about Daddy’s friend Laura. It might well be a long time before he got another weekend like this with his sons in his home, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. Seeing Laura with his boys, watching her patiently answer Lee’s questions and tuck Zak into her side when he started to nod off after dinner…years ago, he’d dreamed about how she would be with their kids. The reality was so much better.

He ducked his head into the bedroom to check on his sleeping sons. How could two small boys expand to take up the space of a queen-sized bed? Lee had his arms and legs flung out, and Zak and worked his way down to the foot of the bed, his arms dangling over the side.

So glad he’d invested in those air mattresses that they wouldn’t be using. He’d be sleeping on the couch tonight, for sure. He eased the dresser drawer open and grabbed a t-shirt and a pair of sweats. If he had to sleep on the couch, he might as well be comfortable. 

The couch was cheap and functional, much like the rest of the furniture in his apartment. Now that he was planning to stay in Philadelphia, he needed to move to a bigger place with better furniture. The cushions’ rough seams dug into his back, and he shifted a few times to try and get more comfortable. He debated turning on the TV and trying to find an old movie to help lull him into sleep, but he knew that there was one sure-fire way to shut up his brain for the night.

It was barely 10pm; she’d probably still be awake. He picked up his phone and called Laura.

“I didn’t expect to hear from you tonight,” she said.

“Kids are asleep. Thought it might be nice to talk to another adult.”

She hummed in response. “Thanks for what you said to Grace. She’s usually not like that, but…we both know how that can go.”

They did. “You might be a picky eater,” he said, ignoring her laugh at that, “but you were never that bad. It’s good that you’re keeping an eye on her.”

“It’s tough being the boss.” _Wasn’t that the truth._

“You’re doing a great job,” he said. Another hum. God, he could listen to that all night. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask,” she replied drily.

“You were great with Lee and Zak today. And you’ve done a great job with Grace. Why didn’t you….” he cut himself off, suddenly unsure about how to ask the question. “Didn’t you want your own kids?”

Silence on the other end. He shouldn’t have pushed. Dammit, a friend wouldn’t ask that question. “I’m not trying to pry.” He was. “But you must have dated in the last eight years.”

Still, nothing. He was about to disconnect the call and try her again when he heard her sigh. “Things change,” she finally said.

He knew that, far better than he should. “Sure they do. But you’re young, and pretty and I find it hard to believe that you didn’t have someone.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

He picked up quickly on the sadness in her voice, and he should probably shut up and change the topic, but he couldn’t help himself. “Do you talk about this with anyone else?”

He could hear a sharp intake of breath. “Yes, Bill. With my doctor, and some specialists, and some very prickly insurance adjusters. Things change, and things happen, and it’s really none of your business.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was sorry. Sorry for bringing it up, sorry for poking at old wounds he knew nothing about. Sorry that she didn’t want to talk about it.

“It is what it is,” she said, and by the tone of her voice, he knew the topic was closed for discussion.

 _Someday,_ he thought. Someday he’d get the full story out of her, but today was not that day. Today, she’d sat and whispered to his kids about space and dinosaurs and the Liberty Bell, and tonight, he needed to return the favor, not dig up old pain.

“So, you wanted to be an architect when you were a kid.”

She laughed at that, a sound he’d never get tired of hearing. “Among other thing," she said.

“Tell me about them. What did little Laura Roslin want to be when she grew up?” In the two years they’d lived together, he’d never asked that question, but now…now, he really wanted the answer.

She giggled again, and with a little prompting, he got her talking about wanting to be a vet, and an artist, long before she ever discovered ballet. He asked a few pointed questions and she answered in detail. Listening to her talk, he forgot about the cheap cushion seams poking into his back.

He forgot about everything but her voice in his ear, and kept talking to her until her stories drifted off into the deep breathing of sleep. He ended the call and laid his phone on his chest. Tomorrow, he’d see her again, and he could suffer through a few short hours on the couch until then.


	7. Chapter 7

He needed to be nicer to Carolanne, he decided. After a full weekend with just him and the boys, he was exhausted. How the hell did she do this all day, every day?

“You look tired,” his ex whispered in his ear.

Hell, yes, he was tired. He was awake far more than he’d been asleep last night, tossing and turning on an increasingly uncomfortable couch. Just when he finally managed to find a position that didn’t kill his back, he was woken by two sets of eyes staring at him.

So he made them pancakes at 7am, argued them into packing their bags and wrestled them into clothes that (in Zak’s case) just barely matched. Their mother would be picking them up at the studio at 11am, and if he ever wanted a weekend with his kids again, he’d better have them ready.

And a good thing too, because Carolanne had been 15 minutes early. She claimed it was because she missed the boys so much, but he suspected she was checking up on him.

Bill tried not to be hurt when the boys dropped his hands and went charging into their mother’s arms. He gave his ex-wife a thin smile, one that she returned. Maybe living this far apart was good for them, he mused. It was the first time in years her smile hadn’t looked like a wolf baring its teeth.

Carolanne’s attention went back to the boys, trying to keep up as they fought with each other to be the first to tell their mother everything they’d seen and done in Philadelphia. She picked up on a few choice words - most notably Laura being repeated over and over again - and that smile disappeared.

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

She’d wanted to get on the road immediately, but the boys whined until she agreed to let them watch half an hour of the party rehearsal. Bill suspected it would be more like fifteen minutes - large group rehearsals like this were notoriously long and tedious. He led them to the mirrors in the front of the studio and told them to sit still and behave. And that lasted for all of three minutes before first Zak, and then Lee, were off and running to Grace. He snapped at the boys to get their attention and pointed to the spot where he’d told them to sit, but the little monsters both turned their back on him and grabbed Grace’s hands.

Traitors.

That’s when Carolanne sidled up to him and whispered in his ear that he looked tired. Funny how she could make even a simple statement sound threatening.

“We had a big weekend. Lots to see and do, and they have a lot more energy than I do.”

“Is that why you had to call Laura for backup? Really, Bill, if you can’t handle the boys on your own for a single weekend, maybe we need to revisit the custody agreement.”

“Don’t start, Carolanne,” he warned. He had absolutely no intention of getting into a fight with her in front of the boys, not to mention the entire company, but her claws were already coming out.

“Look, Bill, I know you think the world will end if you crawl out of the Almighty Laura Roslin’s ass long enough to spend time with your children, but I am their mother, and I certainly don’t want them anywhere near her. And if you don’t like it, then-”

She was getting louder and louder, and it was only catching sight of a familiar redhead ducking into the studio that shut Carolanne up. She had no problem humiliating Bill in front of his dancers or his children, but she’d rather die than let Laura see her make an ass of herself by screaming in a jealous rage. “We’ll finish this later,” she hissed.

Of that, he had no doubt, especially when he caught a glimpse of the look on her face when the boys went running for Laura.

Laura bent down and hugged them, then whispered in their ears as she gestured to their father. They nodded solemnly and scampered back to the spot where they’d been told to sit quietly. “Laura says it’s rude to run around during rehearsal, especially when we’re guests here,” Lee whispered to his father.

“Oh, well, if _Laura_ says,” Carolanne said, and even Lee looked surprised at the venom in her tone. “Come on, boys. We’ve stayed long enough, and we’ve got a long drive home. Say goodbye to your father.”

Bill bent down to hug his boys goodbye. He made them promise to be good for their mother, and he promised in return to call them in the morning. “I love you,” he said.

“We know, Daddy,” Lee said. He took his brother’s hand and pulled him out of the studio, the both of them turning back to wave before they disappeared through the door.

His stomach clenched as he watched the door swing closed. Was it worth the hell that was about to come raining on him, to spend the afternoon with Laura, Grace and his sons? He had a sudden picture in his mind of Laura helping Lee read the museum displays, his little hand clutched in hers. Totally worth it, he decided. Whatever Carolanne decided to do to him, he had no intention of giving up time with his boys, and he had no intention of giving up Laura Roslin ever again.

***

The rehearsal was more than half over before Laura finally made her way over to him. “You look tired,” she said.

“Funny,” he replied, “you’re the second woman today to tell me that.”

“Really? Your charm must be slipping in your old age. Kids wear you out?”

He nodded as he rubbed the back of his aching neck. “I had them for a weekend and I feel like I got hit by a truck. I don’t know how you did it with Grace all these years.”

“Well,” she replied, “I put her in so many dance classes she only had enough energy to eat, do homework and sleep. Worked like a charm.”

He chuckled, but his laugh sounded hollow even to him.

“Hey,” Laura said, nudging him with her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

He shrugged,not sure whether he should tell her what was bothering him. Not sure she even wanted to hear it, and definitely not sure he wanted her to know just how much his ex-wife hated him, and by extension, her. “It’s just…I’m not sure when I’m going to see them again, and it’s my own fault.

She opened her mouth to argue with him, but her jaw snapped shut when she realized that the room had gone silent. Bill and Laura looked up to find Jack, as well as the dancers, staring at them.

“Are we interrupting something with our little show here? Should we leave, and let the two of you finish?” Jack snapped.

Bill leaned into Laura. “I think we’re being rude, and technically, we’re guests at this rehearsal.”

She stole a quick glance at the clock on the studio wall, then reached out and tugged at his hand. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee while the master surveys his domain.”

They sat at the same table where they’d had that first disastrous cup of coffee all those weeks ago, but if Laura noticed, she didn’t say a word. She simply sipped her tea and waited for him to start talking.

“It’s hard,” he said finally. He drummed his fingers on the table, not quite sure how to put his thoughts into words. “I try to talk to them on the phone, but Carolanne isn’t very good about letting them come for visits. Every time I see them, they’re different.”

She hummed sympathetically, but didn’t respond. She was always good at waiting him out.

“I’m just afraid that they’re going to forget me, you know?”

“Bill,” she said. “You’re their father. They’re not going to forget you. Children don’t just forget their parents.”

Jesus, he could kick himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a jackass. I didn’t mean it like-”

She waved away his apology. “I know you didn’t. And I didn’t ask you for coffee so that you could tiptoe around my feelings.”

“Still,” he said. “I should have thought before I opened my mouth.”

“You never have before. Why start now?” She laughed, and he couldn’t stop himself from grinning back at her. “Seriously, Bill, just because something terrible happened to me and Grace, doesn’t mean you don’t get to feel bad because something rotten is happening to you. And I’m not so selfish that I can’t listen to my friend’s problems without turning it back to my own personal tragedies.”

“You’re not selfish at all. If you were selfish, you’d have dumped Lee back on me and run for the hills after his first fifty or so questions.”

“The thought did cross my mind,” she agreed. “No, Bill, he was fine. I had a lot of fun at the museum.”

He grimaced, remembering the look on Carolanne’s face when she realized just who had accompanied her boys and their father to the museum. “Me too, and it’s a good thing, because I’m going to be paying the price for that.”

She quirked an eyebrow at him, confused. “Carolanne. She wasn’t too pleased to hear that you were with us. I hate to tell you this, Roslin, but she’s not your biggest fan.”

“I wasn’t aware that Carolanne was a fan of anyone but Carolanne,” she drawled.

She didn’t let bitchiness slip out often, but when she did, it always made him laugh. “You’re probably right. I think she’s still trying to figure out a way to blame you for her injury.”

“What, by greasing the stage? Not my style. I could have slipped on it and torn my ACL, and where would that have left me? No, if I were going to take her out, I’d have gone old school. Glass in the pointe shoes.”

“I’m flattered that you’d go to all that trouble just to dance with me. Really, Laura, all you ever had to do was ask.”

She reddened a little at that, and the flush brought out the green in her eyes. Something about her was different - she looked a little less haunted, a little less closed off. “You look good today,” he said. _Happy_ , he wanted to add, but he didn’t want to press his luck.

She looked away, staring out the windows of the cafe. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“You also still can’t take a compliment.”

“Then maybe you should stop trying to give them to me.”

“Fine,” he shot back, “you look like shit.”

His timing was perfect - she started coughing and spluttering into her mug, somehow managing to spit a mouthful of tea right in his face. This time, it was his turn to cut off her choked apology, but he was laughing too hard to actually get out any words.

They sat there, giggling and wiping off their glasses and the tabletop, until Bill finally managed to get himself back under control. “Thanks,” he said. He curled his fingers around hers. “I needed this.”

She gave his hand a little tug. “Anytime. That’s what friends are for.”

He held her gaze for a long minute, wanting nothing more than to stay here, her hand in his, for the rest of the day. He had a rehearsal to cover in a few minutes, though, so he reluctantly let her go and slid back in his chair. “I’ve got to get back. And so do you - that kid of yours is going to be done in a few minutes.”

“Ah yes, all nice and tired and ready for food and bed. It’s a good system, Bill, I’m telling you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He followed her out the door, and he was surprised when she threaded her arm through his and held it all the way back to the studio.

***

She’d been joking about using dance to wear Grace out, but tonight, it looked like she wasn’t too far off the mark. Grace collapsed in a heap on the couch, eyeing the stack of schoolbooks she’d left on the coffee table that morning.

“I’d complain about my English paper,” Grace sighed, “but I know you’ll only tell me that understanding Shakespeare will make me a better Juliet onstage.”

“See, you _are_ learning. Now get your feet off the coffee table and get to work.” She pushed Grace’s feet to the floor and dropped her English textbook into her lap. “The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be done.” Laura ignored the pathetic whimper from the couch as she made her way into the kitchen.

As tempting as ordering takeout sounded, she’d been relying a little too much on delivery these days. The fridge was packed with styrofoam, and it was beginning to smell even worse than her niece’s dance bag. Laura pulled the trash can to the fridge and started weeding through its contents, hoping she’d find something green underneath the takeout boxes and plastic bags containing the liquefied remains of what was last week’s grocery shopping trip.

She found a jar of salsa and a bag of cheese that was dangerously close to expiration. A couple of cans of black beans and a can of corn, and she’d have a perfectly respectable soup. Martha Stewart she was not, but at least they weren’t going to starve. It was either that or pasta, and she wasn’t in the mood to listen to Grace bitch about carbs again.

She missed the days when Grace’s biggest complaint about her cooking was crusts on her grilled cheese sandwiches. More than that, she missed the days when meal planning meant getting down to the kitchen before her sisters and her father ate everything in sight. Her mother always made it look so easy.

 _Probably because you weren’t paying attention,_ she reminded herself. She dumped cans into a saucepan, added a good handful of chili powder, and gave it all a good stir with her mother’s favorite wooden spoon.

At least she’d inherited a good set of pots and pans. Her apartment with Bill had been stocked with the finest cookware Duane Reade had to offer, and she’d burned more meals than not. She ate them anyway, too stubborn to admit that she wasn’t good at something.

Bill ate them too, not willing to risk her temper if he asked her why the spaghetti was all stuck together. At least now she knew to give the pot a good stir and salt the water.

She wondered what Bill was eating in that apartment all by himself. She shouldn’t be worried about it, but it seemed that her lot in life was to spend her entire adulthood worrying whether or not the people around her were eating enough. She picked up the phone and called him before she realized what she was doing.

At his gruff hello, she asked him, “Are you hungry?”

“Am I what?”

“Hungry,” she repeated. “I’m cooking, and I always make too much. Are you hungry?”

“I know how to feed myself, Laura,” he said, and she fought back the urge to argue. Hot Pockets did not constitute a meal. Even soup made from cans and barely edible produce was better than the crap Bill was most likely microwaving for dinner.

“Come over. Home cooked meal. It’ll be ready in ten minutes, but I’ll keep it warm for you.”

Somehow, she knew he wouldn’t say no. She gave the pot another stir as he told her that he’d be there as soon as he could.

Dinner was almost ready; just a few more minutes to simmer and she’d be ready to dish up a bowl and take it out to Grace in the living room. She hummed under her breath as she bourreed to the fridge to dig out the cheese. An arabesque and pique battements as she made her way to the cabinets holding her dishware, and a series of attitude turns as she juggled an armful of kitchenware.

“You’re dancing again,” came a voice from the doorway. She stopped in her tracks, feeling more than a little bit ridiculous. Grace, still decked out in her rehearsal clothes, all long lines and willowy neck, and Laura all of a sudden felt old, out of shape and ridiculous dancing Giselle’s peasant variation in her kitchen.

“Sorry,” she said with a grin. “I’ll leave the dancing to the pros.”

“No,” Grace said. “I like it. You haven’t done that since I was little. I used to love watching you dance. You always seemed so…happy.”

“Grace, honey, I _am_ happy. Whether or not I’m dancing in the kitchen has nothing to do with it.” She ladled a healthy serving of soup into a bowl and sprinkled some cheese over the top, mentally reminding herself not to glissade through the kitchen to hand it over.

Grace took it with a raised eyebrow. “Okay, fine, happier. It’s just…in all the years we’ve lived here, I’ve never caught you doing sun salutations or the warrior pose as you cooked dinner.” She wrinkled her nose. “Are there beans in this? Aunt Laura, carbs!”

“Eat what I give you or learn to cook, kiddo. And until you want to learn your way around the pots and pans, stay out of my kitchen.”

Grace shrugged. “Fine by me. I’ll leave you to your…” she gestured to the appliances lining the countertops, “…audience.”

Laura stood perfectly still in the kitchen, running Grace’s words back and forth in her mind. When she was her niece’s age, she practically wore grooves in the kitchen floor rehearsing for upcoming performances or perfecting her technique, but she’d let all of that fall by the wayside as Grace grew older. Years ago, she’d given up the idea that she was a dancer and embraced the reality that Grace was the one who’d have a career. In doing so, she’d forgotten the simple joy of dancing just because she felt like it, just because she had an open room and nothing else she needed to be doing at that particular moment.

She missed it, plain and simple. She missed the days when dancing wasn’t a career. Mostly, she missed the days when dancing wasn’t the reason she lost her entire family. She missed the days when dancing made her happy. Purely, completely happy.

The kind of happy she’d been a few minutes ago, running through the peasant variation while she cooked dinner. The kitchen was still empty, Bill wouldn’t arrive for another twenty minutes or so, and she hadn’t made it to the coda of the variation. She cued up the music on her iPhone, turned down the burner on the stove, and started the variation again.

If the only applause she’d ever earn for her performance as Giselle was the hissing of steam from a pot of soup, she’d take it. Happily.


	8. Chapter 8

G race had dropped her bowl in the sink and decamped for her room long before Bill showed up. Whether she was trying to give them privacy, or just didn’t want Bill to know that she dared to eat a meal, Laura wasn’t sure, but it left the two of them sitting across from each other at her mother’s scarred kitchen table.

It should have been strange, having Bill sitting in her house, eating out of the bowls she and her sisters fought over when they were children, but it was…nice. Natural, even. He was just rough enough around the edges, even after years of classical training and kissing donor ass, to fit perfectly in her shabby old house.

If she were in the mood to overthink things, that would keep her up tonight, but she was in the mood to eat. She picked through her bowl of soup, pushing tomatoes aside to dig out the chunks of avocado.

“You still do that,” he said.

Her hand froze, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “Do what?”

“Pick out the parts you like best to eat first.”

_Did she do that?_ “I don’t do that.”

He grinned at her, then slurped a mouthful of black beans. She looked down into her own bowl at the tomato chunks shoved to the side. Oh lord, she _did_ do that.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to save the best for last?” he asked mildly, not bothering to meet her eyes as he took another swig of beer.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it was rude to comment on a lady’s eating habits?”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then grinned at her. “Yep. You did. Several times.”

She snorted. “As I recall, it wasn’t my eating habits you commented on. It was my cooking.”

His spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl. “Well, I’m happy to see that your skills have improved.”

She rolled her eyes. Bill had the palette of a five-year-old, so a compliment on her improving cooking skills was hardly worth registering. “Grace couldn’t fend for herself if I burned dinner. You could. I guess you could say I had incentive to improve.”

“Funny how fast kids change everything.”

Just like that, she remembered why she’d invited him for dinner in the first place. She flushed a little bit, feeling like a heel that she’d completely forgotten about Zak and Lee going home today and leaving Bill alone in his apartment. “And what about you, Dad? Do you cut the crusts off sandwiches?”

“I’ll have you know that my grilled cheese sandwiches are perfect equilateral triangles.”

Laura laughed at the mental picture of Bill, protractor in hand, carefully slicing through toasted bread and melted cheese. “In that case, next time, you’re making dinner.”

“Next time,” he agreed. “Any time.”

She pushed the tomatoes in her bowl around with her spoon, caught off-guard at the idea of next time. Or any time. What was she doing? Playing with fire. He was comfortable in her kitchen. He was the person she called when she was frustrated with work. He was the voice of reason when it came to Grace refusing to eat bread.

He was the person she relied on. Again. And she’d fallen into it so easily that she hadn’t even realized how much she’d started to depend on his steady presence in her life and his calm voice in her ear.

She didn’t want to need him. She didn’t want to need anyone, not ever again, but here he was in her kitchen, watching her and waiting for a response.

“You done?” she asked, reaching for his empty bowl. He didn’t say a word, didn’t move from his seat, just watched her as she dropped the bowls in the sink and rinsed them before throwing them into the dishwasher. She could feel his eyes boring into the back of her head as she dug through the cabinet for dish soap.

Starting the dishwasher and wiping down the countertops would only buy her so much time, and she knew when she was done setting the kitchen to rights, he’d still be in that chair watching her. _Dammit, Laura, what were you thinking?_

“I should go,” he said, when he finally realized that she could easily spend the rest of the night picking crumbs off the countertop rather than turning around and talking to him. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Any time,” she responded automatically.

“I think that’s my line,” he said with a chuckle.

“It’s getting late. You have company class tomorrow, and I have a beginning yoga class at 10. And I have to check Grace’s homework before she goes to bed.” _And wash my hair and paint my toenails and take out the trash and scrub the grout, and anything else that will get you out of my house and out of my head._

“Right, company class. You know, you’re welcome in company class. Might be good for you.”

“I have my day job,” she reminded him.

He raised an eyebrow. “Yoga.”

“Yes, yoga. Yoga pays the bills. Yoga pays for Grace’s tuition to that very expensive ballet school. Yoga pays for the food you just ate. Yoga kept us in this house when I had absolutely nothing to my name after eight years at ABT. I’m sorry if it’s not classy enough for you, Bill, but it’s kept us alive and afloat, so maybe shove it with the judgment a little bit?”

He threw up his hands and backed away from the table. “Fair enough. Thanks for dinner.”

Before she could apologize for her temper, he was gone.

If her mother were here, she’d be horrified. A lady doesn’t chase away a guest for daring to enjoy himself at her table. It was probably for the best that Grace has been in her room for the better part of an hour; Laura certainly hoped that her niece didn’t take her cues on how to deal with the opposite sex from her pathetic aunt.

She shook her head and resumed scrubbing at a scorch mark on the counter that had been burned into the formica since she was six years old. She could get rid of it, finally, if she just tried hard enough. She could erase all her mistakes if she just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and ignored the tears dripping onto the sponge.

***

Tory was in a mood, that was easy to see. Then again, Tory was always in a mood these days. She hadn’t been the most pleasant person to deal with when Laura had one job; now that she was trying to balance the yoga studio and her rehearsal schedule at the ballet, Tory was downright surly.

“You’re late,” she said, not bothering to look up as she keyed in credit card numbers. “Class is starting.”

Laura was late, but she wasn’t going to apologize - again - for not being able to sleep the night before. Tory would just have to suck it up, or find a new job.

She wouldn’t cry too many tears if Tory did just that. For someone as bossy and demanding as she was, Laura was shocked that Tory condescended to working for hourly pay that was just above minimum wage. Tory should be running a corporation or a political campaign, not wasting her talents on a second-rate yoga studio in a third-rate city.

She smiled and handed Tory a cup of coffee and a muffin, the best bribe she could offer. Tory’s talents may be wasted, but she made sure Laura was where she needed to be when she needed to be there, and that made her worth her weight in gold.

“Blueberry,” Tory muttered with a grimace and shoved the muffin to the edge of the reception desk. Well, she was better than nothing. Laura ignored the muffin that was perched precariously above the trash can and swept into the studio with her yoga mat and her bottle of lavendar essential oils.

“Good morning, class,” she said. She laid out her yoga mat and dimmed the lights. Morning weekday classes were usually light on attendance, mostly retirees and homemakers. She seated herself at the edge of her mat and surveyed the class, smiling at the familiar faces who smiled back at her.

Familiar faces and Bill Adama, front and center on one of the studio’s borrowed mats, grinning like the proverbial cat with a mouthful of canary feathers.

Bill fucking Adama, invading her space, yet again. He was supposed to be teaching company class; why the hell was he here?

She took in a few deep breaths and let out several long exhales. He was here, like it or not, and she had a class to teach. “Sit at the edge of your mats,” she said, “and take deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouths. Let your exhales echo through your body.”

Most of the class kept their eyes closed as they practiced their breathing, but Bill stared at Laura as he let go of his exhale, reminding her of just how well she knew the sound of his breath leaving him. Damn him.

“Mountain pose,” she said, digging her toes into the edge of her mat. “We’ll start with sun salutations.”

He followed along as best as he could, and she had to bite the soft tissue of her cheeks to keep from laughing at him as she nudged his feet out of turnout. Maybe it was unfair, but she used him as an example to her class of the proper way to center their core over their standing legs. “Toes, balls and heels anchored to the floor.”

He laughed as she helped him shift his hips into parallel position. “Balls?” he asked softly.

“Shut up or get out,” she muttered.

He didn’t say another word after that, and she was more than a little gratified to watch him struggle to find the right body position through the rest of the class. This must have been what little Billy Adama was like in his first ballet classes, trying so hard to follow along, molding his sturdy frame and slightly bow-legged knees into fifth position. His brow was knit in concentration as he followed along with her instruction, forcing a body that had spent 30 years in ballet class to unlearn everything he’d ever known.

“Savasana,” she said. “Corpse pose. Close your eyes and breathe deep, and let the energy flow through you and depart.” She edged her way across the room, spritzing a little bit of lavendar oil over each of her students. Yoga taught mindfulness, yet she moved automatically until she found herself at Bill’s mat. She touched his shoulders briefly, just as she had done with the rest of her students, but he surprised her by reaching up to tangle his fingers in hers.

“Corpse pose,” she hissed at him. His eyes opened, and he grinned at her.

“Not dead yet.”

If her Yelp reviews ever got wind of the fact that she sprayed lavendar essential oil directly in the face of one of her new students, she’d be sunk.

***

He was waiting for her when she came out of the back office, eyes a little bit red, but looking none the worse for wear.

“So that’s what you do all day.”

Laura hummed in agreement. “That’s what I do all day.”

He handed the beat-up mat to Tory. “I always knew you were a good teacher.”

Of course he did. “I never needed you to tell me I was a good teacher. And you need to work on your breathing.”

Oh good lord, did she just say that out loud?

“Tell you what, I’ll work on my breathing if you’ll work on your port des bras. Your shoulders are a little weak. Come to my class, and I’ll come to yours.”

Her shoulders were just fine, thank you, after years of downward dog. “And what’s in it for me?”

He looked at her, truly looked at her, with her rapidly fraying yoga pants and her hair tossed messily into a ponytail. “You get to make me look like an ass in front of your yoga class. And I get to make you look like a dancer in front of mine.”

“I’m not a dancer, Bill,” she reminded him.

“You’re not a liar either, Laura. Try to remember that.” He picked up his bag and hefted it over his shoulder. “Next time, bring your pointe shoes.”

Pointe shoes. Her calluses were gone, and her pedicure couldn’t survive a class en pointe. “I’m not a dancer, Bill,” she called after him.

“You’ve been a dancer since the day you were born.” He stopped to thank Tory, and damn her if she didn’t smile at him. “You owe me. Tomorrow at nine am.”

Tomorrow at nine am she should be getting ready to teach another beginning class, but if Tory’s smile was anything to go by, now was the time to ask for a favor.

Pointe shoes. Bad enough to ask Tory to cover for her, but to ask Tory to teach a class so that she could rip the skin on her feet open over and over again?

She flexed her toes, almost feeling the gel padding shielding her feet from the paste and canvas and hard wings of her shoes.

If he could suffer through her class, she could soldier through his. “Tory,” she said, “what are you doing tomorrow morning?”

***

It was just like riding a bike, if riding a bike meant ripping of the skin of her toes and watching as her feet bled through the pale peach satin of the last pair of pointe shoes she’d owned. Frankly, she’d rather crash into a tree head-first than try another pirouette at this point, but Bill was watching her, and she’d be damned if she’d go down without a fight.

Skin would heal, and toenails would grow back, but Sharon Agathon would never stop smirking at her if she didn’t do the fouette combination.

Who was she kidding? Sharon wouldn’t wipe that smug look off her face regardless, but Laura had her pride, even if she didn’t have the top layers of skin on her toes. How did she ever think this was fun?

She positioned herself for the combination and dropped into a low fourth, ready to start her turn combination. Easy physics, centrifugal force and a mathematical equation. Whip the leg around, tuck in the arms, pray for death and hope for the best. She was far too old for this.

And yet, she was still turning, still refusing to back down, when the music stopped. She dropped into a clean ending pose, despite the fact that her quads were burning and she could no longer feel her feet. God, she was going to have to soak her feet in ice just to lead the Chocolate rehearsal, but her neck was long and her hips were in perfect alignment.

“Grande allegro,” Bill called.

Really? No praise? No pat on the back? No acknowledgement that at 35, she could still do four eight-counts of fouette turns?

He walked through the grande allegro combination and she pantomimed the steps with her arms, trying to look engaged in the class but wishing desperately she had her spray bottle of lavendar oil.

He was trying to get the best of her. Maybe she should have been kinder to his sons (how much kinder could she be?) Maybe she shouldn’t have mocked his yoga skills. Maybe she shouldn’t have invited him over for dinner in the first place.

Maybe she should throw her bag over her shoulder and sneak out of the studio. Maybe she should admit defeat while she could still walk.

Maybe she could make him eat his words. She leaned into the combination, tombe, pas de bourree, glissade, pas de chat and contretemps. Back and forth, until she was dancing almost against the mirror. She took another couple of steps out of the way and leaned against the barre, her chest heaving.

Damn him, she did miss this. Yoga was great for mindfulness, but nothing could compare to a grande allegro, to those precious few minutes when she felt like she was flying with each jump. Even as she struggled to catch her breath, she couldn’t deny that she felt…good. Strong. Alive.

Her toes cramped in her pointe shoe, and she struggled to walk it off. Alive, yes, and in pain. Whoever made the point about suffering for art wasn’t kidding. She shook her foot, trying to ignore the joints seizing up, and took her place for reverence.

“Good work, class. Rehearsals start in 20,” Bill said, bowing to the company. She lowered herself into the deepest curtsey her aching quads would allow and nodded to the teacher. When she looked up, he was watching her, waiting for her to acknowledge him. And that bastard winked at her. “Good work,” he repeated.

She was slowly peeling the tape off of her bleeding toes when he sat next to her in the hallway. Bill held up a familiar small brown bottle. “New-skin? Oh, hell no,” she muttered.

He tugged at her feet, dropping them into his lap before unscrewing the cap. “If you’d used it before class, you wouldn’t be bleeding all over my floors now.” He brushed the thick liquid on her oozing feet, and she braced herself for the sharp sting of antiseptic.

“Dammit, Bill! That hurts!”

“You didn’t used to be such a wimp, Roslin.” He waved his hand over her feet to help the liquid bandage dry. When she finally relaxed enough for him to guess that the initial sting had mellowed, he dug his fingers into the balls of her feet, working out her earlier cramp.

“Did you guilt me into coming to class just so you could watch me suffer?” she asked, but her words lacked bite. Hard to be mad at a man who was rubbing her aching feet.

“No, I guilted you into coming to class because I like to look at your legs in tights. The suffering was just a bonus.”

“You’re funny,” she muttered.

Bill shrugged. “I am funny. But you’ve still got the best legs I’ve ever seen.”

There it was again, the compliment. She tugged her feet out of his lap and tucked them beneath her. “Bill, what am I doing here?”

“Bleeding all over my carpet. I thought we established that?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “I mean, besides that. Taking class, leading rehearsals. What’s the point?”

A shadow crossed his face. “Don’t you like it? I thought you were enjoying it.”

That was the problem. She was enjoying it, far more than she had any right to, given her abrupt retirement years ago. She was enjoying it so much that it was making her doubt every decision she’d made eight years ago, and she had no room in her life right now for that kind of second-guessing. “I am enjoying it. But where is it going? I can take class, but I’m never going to be on stage again, so I guess I’m just wondering…what’s the point?”

The hallways were filling up again, dancers skirting past each other to make it to their rehearsal studios. Karl leaned down to whisper a quick “Good job today” in Laura’s ear before Sharon could tug him away. She watched them make their way down the hall, envying their youth and strength while she dug the heel of her hands into her aching muscles.

“You should be spending your time on them,” she said, nodding to the couple as they disappeared into the main studio. “Not wasting it on me.”

“Laura, I never considered time spent with you wasted.”

She ignored the heavy meaning in his words. She was exhausted, and she could feel a bruise starting to throb under her big toenail. She wasn’t up for yet another discussion about their relationship, past or present. “Come on, I’m old and washed up. You have a job here, to guide the next generation of dancers. You should be doing that.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “You think I can’t do both?”

“I think I don’t know why you want to.”

Bill shifted until he was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Laura, his back braced against the wall. “You know, I didn’t want to retire. I thought I was still in my prime, but the roles I used to dance kept going to other people. Instead of Prince Albrecht in Giselle, I was cast as the king.” He shook his head. “You know what the king does? He stands upstage and waves his arms a lot. And I guess I couldn’t complain, because it happened to Baryshnikov. It happened to Stiefel. It happens to all of us. We get old and we’re put out to pasture.” He picked up her hand, toying with her fingers while he thought out his next words. “But I wasn’t done yet. I knew I wasn’t done. I might never be done, because this is all I’ve ever known, and I don’t want to walk away from it. So I’m not onstage anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t still love to dance. It just means I have to do it a different way now.”

“Bill,” she said softly. “That’s your story, not mine.”

He stopped tugging at her fingers and laced them through his. “Isn’t it? You left before you were ready to quit. I just thought you might like a second chance. Even if it isn’t dancing _Giselle_ at the Met, you can still dance. You can still have this in your life. You can still have me in your life, if you want it. It doesn’t have to be the way it was, but it can still be good.”

He leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to her lips. Just enough to remind her how good it was when he was in her life. He pulled back and got to his feet. “Dreams change, Laura. I know that now. But you shouldn’t give up dreaming them.” He stole a quick glance at his watch. “I have to be in rehearsal. Dinner tonight? Bring Grace. I’ll even cut the crusts off your sandwiches.”

She nodded without thinking and watched as he strode down the hallway.

Dreams changed, she knew that better than anyone. The Laura Roslin of eight years ago dreamed of dancing Giselle. This Laura Roslin, soaked in sweat and worrying about making it to her studio in time to teach a 1pm restorative yoga class, dreamed of nothing so grand as applause and roses. Right now, she was dreaming about a tube of Icy Hot, a quick nap after her 1pm, and grilled cheese with Grace and Bill Adama.

Maybe her dreams were smaller now, but maybe they were still worth dreaming.


	9. Chapter 9

The door was ajar when Laura arrived at Bill’s apartment, Grace in tow. She figured that was as good an invitation to make themselves at home as any, so she let them in and settled Grace on the couch with her homework before following the scent of toasting bread and basil into the kitchen. Sure enough, Bill was standing in front of the stove with a spatula in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other.

“Grilled cheese and tomato soup? You spoil me,” she said with a smile. 

“Trying to,” he agreed. Bill handed her the spoon and asked her to taste the soup. She blew on it, then sucked it through her teeth. Not quite as good as her grandmother’s, but better by far than Campbell’s.

“Needs more salt.”

He waved at the spices lined up on his counter, and she eased around him to grab the salt and garlic powder for a little extra kick, trying hard to push back the memories of nights they’d fought over pasta or chicken, more pepper or salt, and whose turn it was to do the dishes.

His kitchen was small, but definitely bigger than the tiny excuse for a kitchen they’d shared in their studio apartment. She had room enough to step away from him as she stirred the pot, but she stayed close enough to lean her shoulder against his while she fiddled with the burner. Close enough that she could whisper that she liked her bread toasted, not burned, and feel his breath, warm against her ear, as he chuckled in response.

Close enough to know she was asking for trouble the longer she stood there. She dropped the spoon into the pot and took a few steps back, crossing her arms as she leaned against the counter. “I hope to God that’s not Kraft singles.”

“Muenster and cheddar. If you think I’d feed you Kraft singles, you don’t know me at all.”

She did know him. Not as well as she used to, but well enough, and that was the problem.

***

The easy peace in the kitchen was shattered the minute she and Bill brought plates, bowls and silverware to the living room. Grace was on the verge of a temper tantrum when Laura shoved a plate in front of her. Carbs and cheese? Her niece was horrified. Better she choke down gruel and weak broth than processed flour and saturated fats. “I’m not eating this,” Grace said, sounding every inch the petulant teenager. “Aunt Laura, you can’t want me to eat this. There are no vegetables!” Suddenly, Laura regretted demanding that Grace finish her biology homework before dinner.

“What do you call tomato soup?” Laura replied.

“Tomatoes are a fruit, not a vegetable. Everyone knows that.”

She opened her mouth to argue with her niece, but Bill cut her off. “You always this ungrateful? I’m pretty sure Laura taught you better than to bitch about what you’re served when you’re a guest in someone else’s home.”

Grace glared at Bill, then turned plaintive eyes on her aunt.

For her part, Laura was shooting worried glances between Bill and Grace. She wanted to intervene on her niece’s behalf, but privately, she agreed with Bill. Judith Roslin would have knocked her head off to see her be so rude to an adult. Not for the first time, she wished she had an actual parent handy to tell her what the right thing to do was in this situation.

“My boys have more sense than that, and they’re still babies. You eat what’s in front of you, or you don’t get fed.”

Right, she did have an actual parent handy. Laura sat back with her sandwich and decided to stay out of it.

Grace looked a little too pleased at the thought of skipping a meal and shoved her plate away. Bill picked it up with a sigh, and Grace shot a smug look at Laura.

Laura knew Bill well enough to know the discussion was far from over. She cast a sympathetic smile toward her niece, but kept her mouth shut. It was probably long past time that Grace learned that she wasn’t always going to get her way.

“And if you don’t eat, you don’t dance,” Bill said as he took her plate to the kitchen. “Company rules.”

“That’s not fair!” Grace whined. “We’re not in the studio now.”

“Yeah, well, life isn’t fair. And when you’re in charge, you can figure out a way to fix that. Until then, you do what I say and you eat your damn sandwich, or you go home and I find someone who isn’t going to screw up my show.”

 _He’s changed._ As Grace picked at the plate Bill unceremoniously dumped back in front of her, Laura studied her former partner. He’d always been loud and outspoken, but this new Bill - this Bill that was perfectly happy being in charge - he was a far cry from the egotistical partner she’d fought with all those years ago. She’d been forced into being a parent by circumstance and desperation, but Bill stepped into it without a second thought. Or without second guessing, she mused. She wheedled and begged and plotted to earn Grace’s cooperation - Bill demanded it without ceding an inch in return.

“If she’s not eating, I won’t either,” Grace muttered, bringing Laura’s attention back to her own plate.

“She eats. And she’s an adult, so she gets to make her own decisions.”

An adult. _Ha._ Still, she couldn’t argue with the fact that having Bill around, she’d started making a lot more decisions lately. Some good, some bad, but decisions nonetheless. All of which had led them to this moment in his apartment with a sullen teenager, a stubborn Bill, and a Laura with a full plate and a suddenly grumbling stomach. She picked up her sandwich and took a bite, pulling at melted strings of cheese and looping them over her finger before she sucked them into her mouth. Grilled muenster and cheddar, almost as good as the diner two blocks away from the Met where they’d celebrated the end of the run of every show. Grace could starve, but Laura had every intention of enjoying her sandwich.

They argued for a few minutes about clean-up, but Laura was firm. He cooked, she cleaned. Bill eventually backed down, mumbling that he wanted to show Grace something anyway. Truthfully, she could use a little bit of quiet with a mindless task - she was more than a little worried about Grace’s attitude and eating habits these days. She welcomed the few minutes it took to scrub off the charred remains of cheese and crusty soup - it gave her time to clear her head. Laura was always better when she had a task to focus on, and dishes were as good a task as any. By the time she had the dishwasher loaded to her satisfaction, the living room had gone quiet, the lights were out, and she could hear the angry strains of Prokofiev over the hum of the dishwasher.

Laura dried her hands on her jeans and threw the dish towel on the counter. Time to face the music, as it were. The lights were out, and Grace and Bill were sitting on opposite sides of his couch - one sullen teenager and one stubborn middle-aged man - both staring at the tv screen. She settled between the two of them, pulling Grace against her, and then turned her attention to what they were watching.

A much younger Laura Roslin flitted across the stage, ducking through set pieces as she searched for her Romeo. Laura drew in a sharp breath. God, was she _ever_ that young?

Romeo stepped out of the shadows and extended his hand to his Juliet, and Laura couldn’t help but steal a glance at the man sitting next to her. Was _he_ ever that young?

She wanted to stop the DVD, to stuff Grace’s books back into her bag and take them both home where it was safe and where she was nothing but a thirty-something yoga teacher. She wanted to escape, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen where Romeo was pleading silently for Juliet to love him. Juliet ran from him, then ran to him, innocence and passion and longing in a pas de deux that had been rehashed for decades before she and Bill had stepped into the roles. She’d seen the greats perform Romeo and Juliet, both onstage and on film, but she couldn’t deny that what she was watching made her long for the two of them to finally…finally…get it right and live happily ever after.

Juliet was her crowning glory at ABT, the role that had won her praise from critics and gotten her a promotion to principal dancer. At the time, she’d never thought much of the role, too busy critiquing every misstep in her performance to even think that maybe the critics had been right. Her Juliet was good. A slight stutter in a pas de couru was nothing compared to the raw emotion she saw on the stage, so she willed her mind to just shut up already and enjoyed watching the girl onscreen throw herself into her Romeo’s arms and kiss him as if her life depended on it.

 _I know the feeling,_ she admitted silently to her younger self.

***

“You were really good,” Grace said as they drove through the streets of Philadelphia.

“I hope so. They don’t usually promote you to principal dancer if you’re just ok.”

“No,” Grace insisted, “you were really good. Like, I remember seeing you in the Nutcracker and I’ve seen you dance around the house, but that…Aunt Laura, that was really good.”

The _New York Times_ review was a lot more eloquent, but Laura would take that compliment any day. “Thanks, sweetie. But why on earth were you watching that?”

Grace wrinkled her nose. “Mr. Adama said that he wanted me to see what a real dancer looks like after she eats half a pizza.”

She wasn’t sure what to address first, the renewed reverence for the almighty Mr. Adama or the pizza comment. Leave it to Bill to bend the facts to suit his purpose. “That’s what a real dancer looked like before she ate half a pizza. If I tried to do that variation after eating that much, I’d have made myself sick.” Mindful of Grace’s recent eating habits, she continued “But, every night after we wrapped, we’d all go out for a midnight meal. And when it was my turn to pick, I always chose pizza, and I always ordered my own and refused to share.”

“I bet Bill hated that,” Grace said, the hint of a sly smile in her voice.

 _Oh, so he was Bill again._ “He did. But he didn’t touch my pizza because he valued his life, and because he knew I could only eat half, and he’d get the rest eventually.”

“Like your crusts.”

She grinned, picturing Bill in his kitchen, picking at the crusts he’d so carefully cut off their sandwiches long after they’d left his apartment. “Like my crusts.”

“It’s so romantic,” Grace sighed, and Laura couldn’t stop her eyebrow from shooting up as she cast a glance over to the passenger seat. Crusts were romantic? “I mean Romeo and Juliet. True love. They’d rather die than be apart.”

 _Nothing romantic about a suicide pact,_ she remembered Bill saying all those years ago.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she said lightly. “True love doesn’t mean much if you’re too dead to enjoy it.”

Or too scared, she reminded herself. Grace didn’t answer, just continued looking out the car window at the safe, comfortable streets of their neighborhood. Not much risk of Mr. and Mrs. Reilly next door committing suicide to stay together. Far more likely that she’d hit him in the head with a rolling pin to get him to shut up about overwatering plants.

True love wasn’t about the grand gestures, she thought. it was about not killing the person you lived with, day in and day out, no matter how richly they deserved it. Or being grateful that they remembered that you didn’t like olives and cut the crusts off your sandwiches just to make you smile.

Grace was still such a baby, and maybe she needed to believe in the idea that true love, a terrible, destructive love that ended in death, was better than nothing. Having had eight years of nothing, Laura wasn’t in any hurry to destroy Grace’s dreams.

Given the choice, though, she’d take a man cooking her a crustless grilled cheese with muenster and cheddar and a cup of tomato soup over a teenager with a vial of poison anyday.

***

They slipped into something of a routine in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, and it happened so easily she didn’t even notice it until she realized that she’d been at his apartment for dinner twice that week and was making plans for him to join them the following night. Barring late rehearsals or Grace’s school schedule, they ate together more often than not. He came to her classes at least twice a week, and she called Billy to schedule him to teach the 10am class so that she could put on her pointe shoes and let Bill torture her in company class on Mondays and Fridays. (Tory’s good will toward Bill had burned off quickly, and she had informed Laura in no uncertain words that she was NOT there to pick up the slack so that Laura could playact at being a ballerina again.) (Tory was about two steps away from being booted out on her ass from the yoga studio; the only thing saving her job was that she was the only one who could manage to make the books balance at the end of the month.)

She was sitting on his kitchen counter, stunned into silence at the realization that she spent almost more time with Bill these days than she did with Grace. He kept talking as he loaded the dishwasher, not noticing the wide-eyed shock on her face as she realized that Bill was fast becoming a permanent fixture in her life. Again. 

“So, next week is Thanksgiving and we have a lighter load before we go into tech at the stage. I was going to head up to New York, but Carolanne is taking the boys to her parents’ house in Ohio. I was thinking maybe we’d take a drive, explore some of Pennsylvania or maybe go down to Baltimore for the day and see the aquarium.”

Her silence finally registered with him, and he slammed the door of the dishwasher before he turned the full weight of his blue eyes on her. “Unless you have better ideas. Or a better plan.”

“Like what, the zoo?”

He shrugged. “The zoo, eating leftovers in front of the TV, or a date.”

She snorted before she could help herself. “A date. That’s funny.”

Bill leveled her with a stare that told her in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t joking. “When was the last time you were on a date?”

“August of last year,” she replied without thinking. Better to not think at all about that night, and that man, and how eager she was to get away from him. “The guy who owns the building where I have my yoga studio asked me out a few times. I think Richard hoped that he could get me to agree to a lousy lease if he bought me dinner and paid me a few compliments.”

“Rookie mistake,” Bill said. He wrung out the sponge, his grimace indicating that he was far less concerned about his cleaning supplies than he was about the idea of her out with another man.

“When was the last time you were on a date?” Laura asked, desperate to steer the conversation away from her pathetic love life. She didn’t want to know the answer, but she really didn’t want to keep talking about herself and her spectacular failures in the dating arena. He’d been married, even if it was to Carolanne, so he definitely had a leg up on her in the romance department.

She hated to think about the legs he had on him the last eight years or so. He surely had enough recent experience to forget her legs wrapped around his waist, all those years ago. Her thighs twitched, muscle memory wanting to pull him close, but she wasn’t interested in going down that path again. Was she? No. She pressed her knees together, trying to still the mindless beat of her heels against his built-in cabinets. His muscles had memories too, and they sure as hell didn’t involve her, if his two sons were any indication.

“Depends on who you ask,” he answered, and it took her a second to remember just what she’d asked. _Dating, right._ She’d asked him about dating. He studied her, again turning the full weight of the legendary Adama stare on the flush of her cheeks and the nervous twitching of her ankles against his cheap pressboard cabinets. She didn’t mean to ask, but he was only too eager to answer.

He kept his distance, but a step to the left and he’d be settled against her, the way he used to be when they shared cooking duties. Bill kept eyeing the space she took up on his kitchen counter, and she had no doubt that to him, tonight was a date. She was wearing yoga pants and an old, beat-up Eagles t-shirt, and he thought that they were on a date. One step, on hand on her thigh, and he’d move right past dating and into familiar, if ancient, territory.

Years ago, it had been threadbare tights and a beat-up sweater thrown on the kitchen floor, and the two of them gasping for breath after they’d stumbled to the hideous futon she’d hated from the first day she walked into his apartment.

At least she’d dressed up for Richard. She might be out of practice, but she knew that a date meant makeup and a dress and not hitching up yoga pants and arguing about crumbs on the counter at the end of the night.

“Good thing I’m not asking,” she muttered, suddenly desperate to put an end to the conversation.

“Good thing. So, Baltimore? See some sharks, feed some fish? Or we could just stay here. Up to you.”

“Bill, what are we doing?” The words left her mouth before she could stop herself. Tonight, it seemed, was the night for asking questions she’d rather leave unanswered.

“Well, I’m loading the dishwasher. You’re overthinking things.” He flicked the knob on the dishwasher,and she flinched when the machine purred to life.

She furrowed her brow. Was she overthinking things, or not thinking enough? She was sitting on his kitchen counter, and for the life of her, she had no idea how she’d made the decision to come here tonight, or last night, or how she’d invited him to her house two nights before.

She liked to plan things. She liked to know the outcome before she set a course of action. She was _careful,_ dammit, and here she was, alone in the kitchen with the most dangerous man she’d ever known while her niece read a chapter of biology in the next room.

“I don’t overthink things.” He didn’t dignify her retort with a reply, just a grunt as he dried his hands on the dishtowel “I don’t. I think about everything the exact right amount.”

“Ok, then,” he said. He slapped the towel down on the counter. “What are you thinking?”

“I think we should go on a date.”

 _What the hell?_ She was thinking about traffic to Baltimore and crowds at the Inner Harbor. She most definitely was _not_ thinking about a date, so why had she said it?

His eyebrows shot up. Clearly she wasn’t the only person in the kitchen surprised by what came out of her mouth. Whatever he was expecting her to say, he sure hadn’t expected that. _Makes two of us,_ she mused.

“Okay…I’m not going to disagree, but where did that come from?”

Laura shrugged, helpless to take the words back and even more incapable of explaining herself.

“A date,” he repeated, more to himself than to her. “Well, we didn’t exactly date before, but,” he grinned at her, “I’m game if you are.”

Oh, God. She buried her face in her hands.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven. Nobody cooks dinner, and no teenagers. We’ll see if this date thing is a good idea. Unless you overthink yourself out of it?”

There was a better-than-good chance that she’d do exactly that, but she couldn’t take it back now. He’d never forgive her if she backed out. She might not forgive herself either.

“But that still doesn’t answer my question. Do you want to go to Baltimore or not?”

“I want to go to Baltimore,” Grace yelled from the living room. Oh, God. She’d heard that? And everything else? Laura buried her face in her palms and silently prayed for the floor to open up and swallow her whole.

Bill wrapped his hands around her wrists and tugged her hands away from her face. “Dinner tomorrow and Baltimore this weekend.”

“I hate you,” she whispered.

“Funny way of showing it, Roslin.” He pulled one of her hands to him and brushed a quick kiss to her knuckles. “Now, go home. I have a class to teach in the morning, and you have a date to overthink.”

***

They were halfway home before Grace said anything. For the first ten minutes, Laura tried to convince herself that Grace hadn’t been listening, but as soon as she opened her mouth, Laura knew she was completely screwed.

“Sooo…you have a date tomorrow.”

Laura pressed her lips together. “We are not going to discuss it.”

“You’re going on a date with my teacher, and you think we’re not going to discuss it?”

Laura took her eyes off the road long enough to raise her eyebrow at her niece. “We are not going to discuss it. Some things are none of your business.”

“Well, yeah, but if he’s a bad kisser and you don’t want to see him again, and he takes it out on me, don’t you think that’s my business?”

First of all, no she did not. Second, she remembered only too well that Bill Adama was a good kisser. Good at other things, as she recalled, before she pushed those thoughts out of her mind. Third, she was going to have to have a long talk with Grace about kissing and…those other things, and she didn’t think it was possible to miss another person as much as she missed her sister right now. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she muttered.

“Of course not, because you worry enough for both of us.”

What was this, Dump On Laura Day? Bill was rubbing off a little too much on her niece for Laura’s peace of mind. “I don’t worry. I merely consider.”

“Yeah,” Grace said, sarcasm heavy in her voice. “You’re considering how to get out of going out with him tomorrow.”

She eased her foot on the brake, coming to a smooth stop at the last stoplight before she turned onto their street. “What I am considering is throwing you out of this car right now and letting you walk home.”

It was an empty threat, of course, and one she’d repeated countless times over the eight years she’d been Grace’s guardian. Maybe a little more serious this time; a walk in the chilly November night might do wonders for reminding Grace just who paid the heat bills in their house, and it would give her at least a good ten minutes to freak out in peace without a teenage audience.

Grace flexed her feet against the dashboard. “These toes are too valuable for mere walking.” At her aunt’s sharp glare, she tucked her feet under her, shifting in the seat so that she could give Laura her full attention. “But seriously,” she asked. “A date?”

A date. She hummed in response. The last thing she wanted was to discuss her love life with her teenage niece, but she was reminded of late-night phone calls to Cheryl when she’d talked about just that, going on and on about how much of an asshole her partner was, and Cheryl crowing that she liked him, and was he cute, and how did he fill out his tights, and Laura was in her twenties again and blushing furiously by the time she pulled into the garage.

“Lights out in an hour,” she said, “and I know you’re not done with your homework, so scoot.”

Grace lifted her hand to her brow in a mock salute before she gathered her bag from the floorboard. “Yes, ma’am.” She was through the door and into the house before Laura bothered to unbuckle her seatbelt.

“Shit,” Laura whispered. She banged her head softly against the steering wheel. “Shit, shit, shit.”


	10. Chapter 10

It felt, uncomfortably, like a first date. All of the butterflies, all of the nerves, a fair amount of abject terror and none of the ease she’d come to expect from spending an evening in Bill’s company.

Not that she’d ever had a first date with Bill - they’d gone from hating each other to sleeping together in so short a time that Laura still felt guilty about it every time she looked at a photo of her overly Catholic grandmother. They’d talked about having kids, about buying real estate, about anything and everything under the sun, but tonight, she was going to have to sit across from him at some fancy restaurant and try to come up with a topic of conversation that didn’t involve their jobs, or her niece, or their past failed relationship.

She tried to think of acceptable date conversation as she shaved her legs, but other than “Come here often?”, she was drawing a blank.

And _why_ was she shaving her legs anyway? She dropped the razor into the soapdish halfway through her task, reminding herself that Bill Adama had no business feeling up her legs tonight…no matter how much she might want him to.

The problem was, she had no idea how much she might want him to. Regardless of their past, he was very much her only friend in the here and now, and she was honest enough with herself to admit that she was terrified of losing him again. And if they moved any closer, and she pushed him away again…he might have been forgiving once, but she seriously doubted he’d be forgiving twice.

She missed her mother. She missed her sisters. She missed having someone, _anyone_ , around to talk about this because right now, her closest confidante was the man who was going to be picking her up in an hour. She might not be an expert on dating, but she was pretty damn sure that nothing would kill the mood faster than her bringing up the fact that she was terrified that he might kiss her goodnight. Especially  when this stupid date had been her idea in the first place.

What was she thinking? _You weren’t_ , she reminded herself. For once, she’d just opened her mouth and let something come out of it without rehearsing it, questioning it, or picking it apart in her brain until she wasn’t even sure what she wanted.

She missed her sisters even more because of it; for once, Cheryl and Sandra would have been thrilled that Laura had just taken a chance. Hell, even her niece was thrilled about it, and Laura didn’t want to stop and think too hard about what it meant that Grace was so invested in her personal life.  Grace was 14; she shouldn’t even be aware that Laura _had_ a personal life.

Apparently, the problem was that Grace was all too aware that Laura _didn’t_ have a personal life, and now Grace had made it her mission to see that Laura rectified that problem. This evening. Right down to picking out her wardrobe for the night, it seemed, when Laura finally ventured out of the shower.

Jeans, a sweater – _Keep it casual_ , Bill had said – and a matching set of lacy underwear. Based on Grace’s selection, Laura was either going to have to start padlocking her underwear drawer, or cancel their cable subscription.

 _There’s no better method of birth control than ugly underwear_ , her friend Marcie had said their senior year in high school. She dropped the wine-colored set back in her top drawer and dug out her oldest, rattiest bra and a simple pair of cotton panties.

She just knew this night was going to be a disaster.

After tugging on jeans that were maybe a little too tight and a sweater that was maybe a little too low-cut for her comfort, she surveyed herself in the full-length mirror. _Not bad_ , she admitted to herself as she fluffed her hair. _The old girl’s still got it._ She wasn’t in any danger of setting the world on fire with her looks, but it was nice to see that the curves that she’d managed to gain over the last few years – curves that would have gotten her fired at ABT – filled out her jeans nicely. Just because she had no intention of Bill Adama getting his hands on her ass in these jeans didn’t mean that she didn’t want him to entertain the possibility.

Possibility – the only thing about first dates she missed.

***

He rang the doorbell a few minutes before seven. Bill was always punctual; one of the many things they’d argued about, both in New York years ago and here in Philadelphia. She’d planned to be downstairs when he arrived, but she was still zipping up her boots when she heard Grace throw open the door. _Dammit_. The last thing she wanted was to leave Bill alone with Grace and let her grill him on his intentions, or God forbid, give him pointers on how to woo her aunt. As it was, Grace had already been completely obnoxious and insufferable throughout the day. Laura wouldn’t put it past her to press a vial of poison into Bill’s hand and beg him to reenact their _Romeo and Juliet_ performance at the end of the night.

“You’re early,” she said as she hit the landing, interrupting whatever Grace was going to say. Not a moment too soon, by the sour look on her niece’s face.

He reached up and took her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “You know what they say. Early is on time, and on time is late.”

She snorted at having that bit of wisdom from their ABT days thrown back at her. “And what about fashionably late?”

“Fashionably late is when I leave without you. Come on.” He pulled her down the last few stairs to the coatrack in the hallway, then helped her into her jacket. He was pulling out all the stops tonight, tugging the lapels of her jacket closed against the November chill, then ghosting his fingers around her neck to free her hair from her collar and tease it back down around her shoulders. “Ready?” he asked.

“As I’ll ever be.”

***

He opened the car door for her and held the buckle for the seat belt, waiting until she was safely secured before closing the door. After years of wrangling Grace into booster seats and minivans, she had to admit…it was nice to have someone looking out for her.

Even if it was a little embarrassing to have a grown man stare her down as she buckled her seat belt.

Before she could collect herself, he was turning the key in the ignition. Bill shot her a quick smile as he started backing out of her driveway, which only further frazzled her already shot nerves. “You know,” she said, “when I said we should go on a date, I thought it would be understood that I’d be _planning_ the date.”

He was too busy looking over his shoulder at the traffic on her street to rise to the bait. “You suck at planning. You couldn’t even commit to going to the aquarium in Baltimore.”

True, but _still_. “Are you such a Neanderthal that you’re afraid of letting me take the driver’s seat?”

“I’ve seen you drive. Doesn’t fill me with much confidence.”

She raised an eyebrow and stared him down. She drove just fine, _thank you very much_.

“Besides, wouldn’t be much of a first date if we got t-boned trying to pull out of your driveway.”

She tried to hide the catch in her throat at the reference. It was a date, it was Bill, it was supposed to be fun. It wasn’t supposed to be a rehash of her past tragedies. _It’s a joke and nothing more_ , she reminded herself.

“Laura,” he said as he backed into the street, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

For once, she decided to let herself believe. “If I die before I find out where you’re taking me, I’m going to punish you for all eternity.”

When she found out where he was taking her, she was tempted to punish him regardless. Skateland? She expected a nice dinner, or a walk in one of the many parks around her neighborhood. Maybe even pizza and a beer, but some roller rink that was one bad Saturday night away from shutting down?

“You really know how to impress a girl,” she said with a snort.

He pushed the gearshift on his Jeep into park. Of course they’d gotten a spot near the entrance; did anyone even come to Skateland anymore?

“I tried to think about the best first date I’d ever had. The roller rink was my second choice.”

She hummed. “It’s shocking that you ever convinced anyone to marry you.” Yes, because bringing up the ex-wife was clearly great first date conversation. This evening was already a disaster, and they hadn’t even gotten out of the car.

“I’ll have you know that Jenny Yates was more than willing to go steady with me after our night at the roller rink.”

“Oh?” she asked. “And did you woo her with your graceful skills during the couples skate?”

He laughed at that. “No,” he said, as he reached for the door handle. “I kissed her behind the Ms. Pac Man game in the arcade.”

She was still trying to gather her purse and coat when he opened the door for her. This was new. And sweet, she had to admit. She didn’t bother with her coat – they were less than fifty feet from the door, so she tucked it in her elbow and let him take her hand again.

It was nice, the simple feeling of someone holding her hand.

“And what was your first?”

“Hmmm?” He looked at her, confused. She supposed _What was your first_ was also not exactly proper first date conversation.

“Roller skating was your second best first date. So what was the first?”

He grinned at her, the same smile that she’d known so well years ago and had seen more and more in the last few weeks. That smile was the reason half her left calf was covered in stubble and she was wearing cheap cotton panties from Target. “Convincing a pretty girl to eat Thai food with me after _Sleeping Beauty.”_

Thai food and _Sleeping Beauty_. As she recalled, it wasn’t so much a date as a summons, and didn’t involve convincing so much as demanding. “That wasn’t a date. That was you telling me that we needed to work on our performance.”

“It was a date,” he insisted. “I just didn’t tell you that, because I knew you’d never agree to it.”

Of course she wouldn’t have agreed to it. At the time, the two of them had only made it through one conversation about _Don Quixote_ before they were back at each other’s throats. “You spent the entire two hours over dinner telling me every single thing I did wrong.”

Bill shrugged, his eyes lighting up at the memory. “I didn’t say it was a _good_ date.”

“You just said it was your best.”

“It was, for me. But for you, I bet it doesn’t even make the top ten.”

Laura wasn’t even sure she had 10 first dates to rank, never mind the fact that she was still struggling with the idea that _that_ particular evening was a date. She was still lost in the memory of that night as he paid their entry fee and pulled her along to the rental counter. He tugged her a little closer. “It might not have been a good date,” he said, “but you still kissed me goodnight.”

As she recalled, she also kissed him good morning. One of the few times she didn’t heed Marcie’s advice on ratty underwear.

And on that topic…“I’m not making out with you behind Ms. Pac Man,” she said.

“I’m sure these days they have more interesting video games. I’ll just have to take my chances.”

***

Bill Adama on roller skates was very much like Bill Adama in ballet slippers. He corrected her positioning while he guided her along the rink. She was perfectly happy to coast along to Taylor Swift, but Bill had to have an opinion about everything. When he reminded her once again to get her weight out of her heels, she grabbed his shirt and pulled him close. “Bill. Shut up and enjoy this,” she hissed.

 _Bill Adama’s hands are on my ass_ , she thought, and she couldn’t stop the giggles that burst forth. “No more instructions, sir. We do this together, or not at all.” She pulled his hands out of her pockets, then laced her fingers through his. “Onward and upward.”

“You’re the boss,” he agreed. “This time, I’ll let you take the lead.”

Well, wasn’t _that_ a nice change of pace. “We’re going to skate,” she said, “and I’m not going anywhere near the arcade with you.”

“The arcade can wait,” he agreed. “Maybe, by the time we get there, it will be my best second date.”

The music changed, Taylor Swift giving way to Journey. Damn him, but Bill Adama was good at this. She clutched his hands in hers as they coasted toward the wall of the rink. “I don’t want to hear about your second dates,” she said.

“Not even the one where I argued with a pretty girl wearing my t-shirt and nothing else about the significance of reincarnation in _One Hundred Years of Solitude_?”

_No, definitely not that._

“Doesn’t count,” she said.

Bill smiled again, his face settling into the same dimples that she’d known many years ago and a few lines that she’d mapped out in her head over the last few weeks. Damn if that old smile and that new face didn’t make her knees just a little bit wobbly. “And why exactly doesn’t it count?”

She had a point to make, and once her knees stopped shaking, she was going to make it. Laura took a deep breath. One foot in front of the other, she reminded herself. Baby steps. “First of all, it doesn’t count because it’s not a second date if it happens the morning after a first date that never ended because I never left your apartment. Second of all, it’s not a second date because I never agreed that we even had a first date.”

“Well, we’re having a first date now. In ten years or so, are you going to argue with me about it?”

She shrugged. “Are you really thinking about what we’re going to fight about ten years from now? Why don’t you try to make the most of the time you have?”

“I’m trying to,” he said. “But making the most of the time I have means a trip to the arcade. What do you say, Laura? I’m not the only one who’s wasting time.”

***

In the end, it wasn’t her ratty underwear or unshaven legs that saved her from public indecency in the arcade; it was the fact that her feet hurt and her stomach was empty. She kicked off the rental skates and sent Bill back to the counter to return them while she made her way to the sad little concession stand and ordered two slices of pizza that had probably been under a heat lamp for a good five days now. She didn’t even bother blotting the grease from her slice; at this point, it had been baked in and completely absorbed by the limp, soggy crust.

“You really know how to show a girl a good time,” she said as she twirled a bit of greasy cheese around her fingers.

He pulled the tough strings of mozzarella off her hand and popped them into his mouth. “Maybe if I’d taken you skating years ago, things would have been different.”

Laura sighed as she dropped the crust onto her paper plate. “Let’s not talk about years ago,” she said. “We’re here now and we’re having fun. Isn’t that enough?”

It wasn’t enough, she could see by the irritation flickering across his face. Instantly, she was on the defensive. She leaned back against the booth and crossed her arms, glaring at him, just waiting for him to bring up just how things could have been different.

“I don’t want to argue with you-“

“Oh, no? That’s a first,” she snapped.

Bill sighed, mocking her body language as he crossed his own arms. “I just don’t think we can move forward if we can’t talk about the past.”

She didn’t want to talk about the past. She wanted to eat her pizza and drink her shitty light beer, and maybe even kiss him in the arcade if he played his cards right. She wanted to have an actual, honest-to-God first date that didn’t end in yet another person psychoanalyzing her about a part of her life that she’d been trying for eight years to lock away . “Well, I can tell you this,” she said, “we sure as hell aren’t moving forward if you insist on living in the past.”

 _That_ struck a nerve. “You were the one who pushed us forward! You were the one who said we should go on a date!”

She crumpled up her napkin and threw it on her plate. “Well, maybe that was a mistake.” _One of many_. Before she was halfway out of the booth, a firm grip on her arm stopped her.

“Laura,” he said, and there was no mistaking the tone of warning in his voice. “Don’t walk out on me again.”

“Take your hand off me, Bill,” she said as she pried his fingers from her arm, “and get a grip. I can’t walk out on you. You’re my ride home.” Laura bent back into the booth and collected her purse and coat with as much dignity as she could muster, which, given the location, wasn’t much. “And I’d like to go there now, please.”

She turned her back on him and stomped toward the exit, not even bothering to look back to see if he was following. Let him sulk alone in the skating rink. Would serve him right for ruining what was otherwise the best first date she’d ever had.

***

By Sunday night, Laura was thanking God that the weekend was finally over. When she’d come barrelling into the house on Friday night, Grace was sitting on the couch and had immediately jumped up and started hurling a combination of questions and giddy squeals at her. Laura had just held up a hand and shot a warning glare at her niece, then stalked to the liquor cabinet and grabbed a glass and a bottle of wine. Grace was still waiting in the front hallway when she came back. “Later,” she said. _Never, more like_. “I’m going to bed. Don't stay up too late.”

Grace had tried to argue, but Laura ignored her niece, intent only on making it to her room and locking the door before her composure deserted her completely and she burst into tears.

The next morning, Grace had started up again before Laura even managed to pour herself a cup of coffee, and no amount of “I don't want to talk about it” was enough. Finally, Laura had snapped “It’s none of your damn business,” sending Grace into a hurt and angry slump in the living room while she seethed and sulked in the kitchen. The two of them had barely exchanged three sentences since, and Laura was grateful for a new week of school and rehearsals to distract her niece from her pitiful love life.

On Monday, however, Laura realized that a new week brought an entirely new set of problems, and she was tempted to throw the covers back over her head and sleep right through company class. She hadn’t spoken to Bill since he dropped her off after their utter failure of a date, and the smart thing to do would be to hide out at home until her rehearsal at 1pm. Better yet, to call Jack and quit the job she’d never wanted in the first place.

“You’re not a quitter,” said a small voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like her father, so she dragged herself out of bed and went about getting ready for her day.

It wasn't that Bill didn't speak to her in class that sent her temper flaring again. She wasn't a company member; she was a guest and he’d be a piss-poor artistic director if he ignored his professional dancers to pay attention to her many screw-ups during the barre. No, it was the fact that he didn't look at her, not once, not even when she was standing right in front of him and settling her weight firmly in her heels like a stubborn three-year-old, that had her fuming in the dressing room.

She hurled her pointe shoes at the mirror, narrowly missing a very surprised Sharon Agathon who had chosen the exact wrong time to exit one of the bathroom stalls. “Are you insane?” Sharon asked, just as easily as if she’d been asking if Laura thought the weather was a bit too warm for November.

“Sorry. I thought I was alone.”

“Well, _there’s_ a surprise,” Sharon drawled.

Suddenly, Laura had had enough. Enough of Bill glaring at her across the studio, enough of Jack bitching at her that the third group of flowers were still late on their entrance, enough of Grace making cow eyes at her over breakfast, and enough of Sharon Agathon giving her shit for no good reason. “Do you have a problem with me?” she snapped.

Sharon yanked open her locker so hard that the metal door clanged against the wall and bounced back, narrowly missing her fingers. “Yeah, I do. You’re selfish.”

Selfish? _Selfish_? After giving up her career to care for her niece, she was selfish? And now, hanging around after rehearsal hours to reassure nervous corps dancers, she was selfish? Laura couldn’t think of a single selfish thing she’d ever done with her life, and here was the star of their show accusing her of being selfish. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

Sharon didn’t even bother to answer; she just continued stuffing her dance gear into her bag. Laura had lived with a child long enough to know that whatever it is Sharon wanted to say to her, it would come out eventually. She had a good 45 minutes before Grace was done for the day; she could wait.

“Selfish,” Sharon finally said. She zipped up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “And if you need me to tell you that, you’ve got a lot more problems than I thought.”

“What the hell did I ever do to you?” Laura asked.

Sharon stared at her, anger giving way to something that looked uncomfortably like pity. “The sad thing is, you don’t even know.”

“Know what?”

“Do you even remember me?”

Laura snorted. “Of course I remember you. You had just gotten your first solo role when I left. One of Forsythe’s ballets, I think, in the spring season. Back then, you used to be a lot nicer.”

“And do you know how I got that solo role?”

In those dark days, all Laura could remember was the police officer on the stage of the Met, seeing her niece wrapped in plaster and bandages, and picking out caskets for her parents and sisters. “I’m guessing you earned it.”

“I earned it because every day during rehearsals for _La Bayadere_ , you stayed late and walked us through the Kingdom of the Shades variation. I earned it because you helped me earn it, and then, when things got tough, you were gone.”

 _When things got tough?_ “My family died, Sharon. What was I supposed to do, pretend it didn’t happen and wait in the wings for you to ask me whether or not you pointed your goddamn feet?”

“You think you’re the only person to have to live with that? My parents died in a fertilizer fire when I was an apprentice. I wanted to quit, but I didn’t, because a ballet company is a family too. And you forgot that.”

Laura opened her mouth to argue, but Sharon cut her off. “We were a family. We relied on you, and you just left. And when you left, you threw us all off. You never even said goodbye. You were just gone, and you never once bothered to think about what that would mean for the rest of us.”

Laura thought Sharon was done with her tirade – and Lord knew, if anyone was selfish, it was Sharon – but she stopped at the door of the dressing room. “Life is hard, Laura, but you don’t quit living because someone else did. You could have come back. We would have helped you, like you did us. But you didn’t, and I’m sorry…I can’t forgive you for that.”

 


	11. Chapter 11

Five days of pretending Laura Roslin didn’t exist, and Bill was ready quit his job, go back to New York and work in a bodega rather than stay in Philadelphia and pretend that seeing her in the hallways of the Pennsylvania Ballet building wasn’t torture.

He had to give her credit – she’d shown up for company class. He didn’t expect that. She screwed up almost every combination at the barre – he didn’t expect that either.

He didn’t know what to expect from her anymore, and what made it worse was that he had no idea what she expected from him. He thought she’d disappear again; he never expected to see her at 9am the Monday after their disastrous date.

Maybe he should have hit the child locks on his car and kept her hostage in her driveway until they’d worked things out. Maybe he should have pulled her aside after that Monday class where she’d blown every combination and glared at him, just daring him to correct her positioning. Maybe if he’d let her yell at him, get out whatever she was holding back, they could have fixed this mess they were in.

Maybe if he’d done either of those things, she’d have run away again and he’d have lost her forever. As it was, she was showing up for his class and for her rehearsals, so maybe he still had a chance.

Or he was kidding himself, eight years later, hanging his hopes on maybes.

He had one more rehearsal to go before the short two-day Thanksgiving break, and of course it was with Clara and her Nutcracker prince. Last week, he’d pictured them sailing through the rehearsal, and then following Laura and Grace home and cooking them dinner in Laura’s comfortable kitchen. He would have put up a fight about the clean-up, but eventually left Laura to set things to rights in her kitchen while he retreated to the living room to watch yet another ballet video with Grace. He would have talked her into letting him stay the night in her guest room so that they could get an early start on their Thanksgiving dinner, a meal that he didn’t entirely trust her to cook on her own, then talked her into letting him stay again after the turkey was carved and Grace was sacked out in her room so that they could drive to Baltimore on Friday before traffic on 95 got too bad. Now, he was just looking forward to getting the rehearsal done so that he could go home to his cramped apartment and work his way through a bottle of Scotch. 

He had no reason to get up early tomorrow. No warm, cozy house where he could watch the parade and make jokes about Laura’s cooking. No table, set elegantly with heirloom china, where he could stare down his Clara and demand that she eat green bean casserole and stuffing, because damn if he didn’t have a vested interest in making sure that Laura’s stubborn niece made it through _The Nutcracker_ without a full-fledged eating disorder.

No nightcap after Grace had gone to bed, where he and Laura could talk about anything and nothing. He had wanted their relationship to be better this time, but it was even worse than the last time she left him.

Before, he could kid himself that she left because of Grace. Now, he had to accept the fact that he was the one who drove her away.

Well, at least the last rehearsal was done, and he could get out of the stifling studio long enough to try to get his head straight again. His bag was packed and he was within arm’s reach of the building’s front door, shepherding his two young protegees, when he heard a familiar, unwelcome, shout behind him.

“Bill,” Jack said, “My office.”

So much for an easy escape. He sent Grace and David on their respective ways, neither of their parental figures bothering to come into the building to pick up their kids. He expected that too, but it stung nonetheless. 

Bill had known Jack for far too long to be surprised by his fidgeting with an unopened pack of cigarettes, batting it back and forth between his paws like a housecat. “You wanted to talk?” he asked.

“I did. Laura put in her notice today.”

Finally, something that wasn’t a surprise. Still, he couldn’t quite stop the hitch in his breath.

Jack tore at the cellophane wrapper on his pack of smokes. “I told her no.”

Yeah, because that had always worked so well, Bill thought. He sat stiffly in his chair, watching as Jack tugged a cigarette out of the pack and rolled it between his fingers.

“I told you I wouldn’t get involved in your personal life,” Jack said, waving the unlit cigarette at him. “And yet, here I am.”

“Here you are,” Bill agreed drily.

“Here I am,” Jack continued, “wondering why it’s Sharon Agathon ready to send her screaming back into the dull Pennsylvania nights, when I thought it would be you. Wondering why my associate artistic director made such a colossal fuck-up of what should be a very straightforward Nutcracker. So, Bill, you got any answers for me? Any reason that Sharon should tell me that when I asked her why my best coach wanted to leave, she should ask you?”

No. No, Bill did not have a good answer. God help him if ever knew why Laura did anything. He shrugged. “You hired her.”

Jack threw the unlit cigarette into the trash. “Yeah, Bill. I hired you too.”

“And I told you I didn’t want anything to do with her. So if things didn’t work out like you wanted, you really can’t blame me.”

Jack slammed his hands down on his desk, sending the pack of cigarettes flying onto the well-worn gray carpet at Bill’s feet. “Jesus Christ, Bill, YES I CAN. I gave you a goddamned giftwrapped second chance with Laura Roslin, and you fucked it up! How many second chances do you think you’re going to get?”

“How many second chances is she going to throw in my face?” Bill yelled back. He took a deep breath, then another. “I told you this was a mistake, Jack. I told you to keep her away from me. If she wants to quit, it’s not my problem.”

Jack stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment. “You’re right. It’s not your problem. It’s not your problem that she doesn’t want to be in the same room as you. It’s not your problem that our Sugarplum Fairy doesn’t want to be in the same room as her. It’s not your problem that not two, but three adults can’t get past their differences and figure out how to work together on a ballet that we can all do in our sleep. It’s mine, and I’ll solve it. She wants to quit, I’ll let her quit. She’s too much of a pain in the ass anyway.”

Bill opened his mouth to argue, but Jack cut him off. “That’s enough. Take your break, get some rest, and come back ready to work. We open in a week and a half.”

A break was exactly what Bill wanted. He shoved himself out of the chair and made for the door, more than ready to be done with the Pennsylvania Ballet for 48 hours. Before he could slam the door behind him, Jack’s voice stopped him.

“She said she wants to quit because she doesn’t think you’ll ever forgive her. Maybe while you’re sulking at home, you can figure out what the almighty Bill Adama needs to forgive her for.”

He’d already forgiven Laura, hadn’t he? He thought he had, but Bill wasn’t so sure anymore. He’d be damned if he’d admit it to Jack Cottle, and he’d be damned if he’d give him the satisfaction of slamming the door after a parting shot like that. He was halfway down the hall before Jack called him back.

“Bill,” he said, “Sharon told her she was selfish for quitting all those years ago. Did you ever tell her she wasn’t?”

He didn’t remember Laura asking for his input one way or the other. 

***  
He hated this apartment. It was too damn small, too corporate, too much like living in a hotel. If he stayed in Philadelphia, he needed to find a new place to live.

It was a big _if_. If he stayed in Philadelphia, he’d always be waiting for Laura. Maybe eight years was long enough to wait. No job was worth dragging himself through that kind of torture, especially if it came with Jack Cottle questioning every decision he made in his personal life. 

He might not be artistic director material yet, but he could probably get another associate artistic director gig elsewhere. Miami, maybe, or Washington. Hell, even San Francisco and Seattle weren’t out of the question. Bigger companies with bigger budgets than Pennsylvania, and he wouldn’t have his past shoved in his face every fucking day when he came to work.

It would be a no-brainer, if it weren’t for Lee and Zak. When it came to his kids, Bill wasn’t willing to put a country between them. Better to stick it out in Philadelphia and find a new place that had more room for the boys. He could rent a little house with a yard and a couple more bedrooms. It wasn’t what he’d envisioned when it came to having kids, but it would be better than what he had right now.

What he had right now was a full day to himself. Stores were closed, and he had a tower of styrofoam holding science experiments in his fridge. He didn’t want to think about how long it had been since he’d cooked a meal just for himself in his apartment. The freezer was well stocked with microwave meals; he’d just have to make do.

He was standing in front of the freezer, letting a three-week supply of frozen food slowly defrost as he stared at its unappetizing contents, when he heard a tentative knock at the door.

 _Laura,_ he thought, then brushed the thought away. She was about as likely to show up as the ghost of Thanksgiving past with a full meal. Probably some poor neighbor who’d forgotten to buy cranberry sauce or needed a stick of butter.

“Laura?” The ghost of Thanksgiving past, in the flesh, waiting for him to move aside and let her in.

She wrinkled her nose at him as she ducked past him into his apartment. “Who else would it be, showing up on your doorstep on Thanksgiving morning?”

Who else indeed. He followed her into his kitchen and leaned against the counter as she dug through his cabinets, finally unearthing a couple of shot glasses. She filled them to the brim with the bottle of Scotch on his counter and pushed one of the glasses toward him. It was a little early in the morning to be doing shots, but he didn't think questioning her on her beverage selection was going to get them very far. It also wasn't the question he wanted to ask.

 _Why are you here? Why haven’t you talked to me? Why do you want to quit? Why do you think I won’t forgive you?_ It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask at all, but if he ever had the guts to ask any of the other ones rattling around his brain, he was going to need a good belt of that Scotch.

She tossed it back with a neat little flick of her wrist, begging another question. Where had Laura Roslin learned to drink like that?

“i need to talk to you,” she said as she wiped her mouth with the ragged sleeve of her shirt, “and God help me, but I don't think I can do this sober.”

He threw back his own shot and took the bottle from her, refilling the glasses. Day drinking on Thanksgiving with Laura Roslin was probably a terrible idea, but at this point, he’d made so many bad decisions that one more couldn’t hurt. “To your health,” he said as he held out the shot glass.

“Something like that,” she said, and downed the second shot. This time, she came up coughing and spluttering, and he patted her back like he would a child.

“I don’t usually do this,” she said, once she was able to catch her breath. Her face was red and her eyes were watering behind her glasses. He’d seen her in full stage makeup and decked out in ballgowns for donor galas. In this moment, standing in his kitchen in jeans and an old Penn State sweatshirt, ignoring the tears welling up in her eyes to swipe her nose with her sleeve, he’d never thought her more beautiful.

He was tempted to lighten the mood by asking her what exactly she usually did with ex-lovers on holidays, but he just continued to rub her back as she caught her breath. Laura came here to talk, and he was going to let her do just that.

When the runny nose was taken care of, she squared her shoulders and turned the full weight of her gaze on him, taking in his rumpled pajamas and hair sticking out from a night of restless tossing and turning. The corner of her mouth twitched, and he knew she was fighting back a joke at his expense, but it seemed she wasn’t in any hurry to lighten the mood either.

“I owe you an apology.”

 _Several,_ he thought, but if she only had one to offer, he’d be glad to hear it.

“That night that I left New York, I really thought it was the end for us. The end for me, too.” She worried the shot glass back and forth on the counter. “It wasn’t what I wanted, Bill, but it was what I needed to do.”

 _What about his needs,_ he wanted to ask. She’d been his partner, his lover, his future.  
He could have gone on for hours about how she’d betrayed him, but Laura’s sharp intake of breath stopped him mid-thought. 

“I’m not apologizing for that. She was six. Her parents were dead. Do you know how many forms I had to sign to authorize treatment in the case of cardiac arrest, brain death or other organ failure? I spent every moment in that hospital waiting for her to die for at least two weeks after the accident.”

At the time, he’d been furious, but having Zak and Lee...he understood her a little better. “If you’re afraid I’m not going to forgive you for loving your niece and wanting what was best for her...Laura, you’re nuts. If you think I’m going to call you selfish for wanting to take care of her...” Even rolling the words around in his head about it was enough to make him want to throw up the two shots of Scotch roiling in his stomach.

“She was in the hospital for two months. Two months, Bill, and every morning I was terrified that I’d get there too late to say goodbye to her.”

Laura grabbed the bottle and poured another shot, but stared at it rather than drinking it. “There were times when I thought I’d bring her back to New York. I thought you’d be waiting for me, and we could figure it out, but she needed so much rehab. She could barely walk when she left the hospital, and my parents’ house was bad enough. Our apartment in New York? So small, and four flights up?” She dipped her finger in the glass and licked the Scotch away. “It wasn’t going to happen.”

“Didn’t you think that I might want to have a say in that?”

She met his eyes, steady and calm, unnerving him. Maybe one of the things he still needed to forgive her for was the way she saw all of him, right down to how selfish he could be for still being angry with her for wanting to sacrifice her dreams to care for that kid.. 

“By the time I got her home and walking again, you were back with Caroline. You had your say, and it didn’t involve us.”

Jack was wrong. Sharon was wrong. Laura was wrong. It wasn’t his forgiveness she needed; it was hers. 

“I should have been there,” he said.

Laura shrugged. “You had your job to do. The company needed you more than they needed me.”

Fuck the company. Fuck Bill Adama, the star dancer, his career interrupted by the loss of his partner. Fuck his injured feelings and his rebound romance with Carolanne. Fuck him for never realizing that he could have packed up his own bags that night and followed her to Philadelphia, sat with her in those waiting rooms, and held her hand while she signed the endless forms.  
Fuck him for waiting for the women in his life to make him a priority, when he’d never done the same for them. And fuck him especially, six ways from Sunday, for making her come to him with apologies.

“I was an idiot,” he said. She snorted in reply, and waved her hand in an odd little water-under-the bridge movement, but he caught it in his own and brought it to his lips.

“A complete idiot,” he repeated. Her fingers were so small and delicate, the soft skin like velvet under his lips when he kissed her knuckles.

She tugged away from him, but he locked his fingers with hers, pulling her closer. “I want to make it up to you. I want to be here for you now, like I wasn’t before.”

“You don’t-”

“Yes, I do,” he insisted, her hand still nestled in his. “I want to make it up to you by helping you make Thanksgiving dinner. I want to make it up to you by telling Sharon to shove it up her ass. I want to make it up to you by giving Grace the best performance of her life.”

She was once again struggling for breath, trying to find a corner of his small kitchen to hide in, despite the fact that he had no intention of letting go of her. “This isn’t why I came here,” she said.

“This isn’t why I came here either,” he answered, a genuine smile spreading across his face. “But we’re here now, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Laura looked at the microwave meal he had sitting on his counter. “You wouldn’t want to be anywhere else?”

He wanted to be in her kitchen, carving a turkey while she worried over the gravy and Grace complained about the wait for Thanksgiving dinner from the living room. “I could think of another place I’d rather be,” he said, her hand still tucked into his.

“Me too,” she admitted with a shy smile, and he led her out the door and into her waiting car, never letting go of her hand as she drove them across town to where he wanted to be.


	12. Chapter 12

December 3, 2016

_Everything is going to change,_ Laura thought to herself as she watched Grace and David finish the first act pas de deux.

The Pennsylvania Ballet was opening their _Nutcracker_ run tonight. As a member of the artistic staff, she should have been down in the front rows, enjoying the fruits of their labor. Years of being a ballet parent kept her in the wings with a bag of hairpins, a sewing kit, hairspray and powder for any and all onstage emergencies Grace might have. The view wasn’t as good, the stage lights shining in her eyes from the opposite wing, but she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

The time was going to come, sooner rather than later, when she wouldn’t be there in the wings for Grace. This performance, so different than the school shows and competitions, was going to springboard Grace into a full-fledged career. Maybe not this year, maybe not the next, but soon enough Grace was going to land a scholarship to the School of American Ballet or ABT’s own JKO School, and Laura would have to put her own fears and feelings aside and help her pack up and move to New York, just as her own parents had done when she was sixteen. Laura wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the little girl who cried the night of her first performance, terrified to take the stage unless Laura promised her she’d be waiting in the wings the second she came off the stage.

She wished she could ask her mother now if she’d been ready. Then again, she remembered her mother well enough to know that the answer would have been no. Even with Sandra and Cheryl still so young and so loud tearing around the house, Laura was sure that her mother felt her absence every day. The same way she was going to feel Grace’s absence, every day, when she flew away from their safe little nest in Philadelphia.

_Everything is going to change,_ she breathed again, wrapping her arms around herself to contain the shiver that went up her spine.

Everything had already changed, she realized, when the arms around her waist were covered by another, stronger set of arms.

“You ok?” Bill whispered in her ear. 

“Fine,” she said as she leaned into him, taking comfort in his steady warmth against her back. “I’m just...enjoying the show.”

“If this is how you look when you’re happy, I’d hate to see you sad.”

Laura forced a smile. “I am happy. I’m just...Bill, this is just the start for her. I’m just wondering what that’s going to mean for me.”  
He pulled her to him a little more tightly. “For us.”

_Us._ There was an us, now wasn’t there? A little shaky, and still a little uncertain, but there was definitely an _us._ It had been an us when they cooked Thanksgiving dinner, and an us that argued over the fastest route to Baltimore the day after Thanksgiving, then argued again over burgers or crabcakes in the Inner Harbor. When she packed leftovers to take to the studio for lunch after rehearsals resumed, she packed them for Bill as well as herself. When she came home at night with Grace, he was right behind them. Almost as if he were afraid to leave her side for long enough to let her overthink her way out of giving them another chance.

She couldn’t blame him. Even the way he was holding her now, she could feel the tension in his arms. Still afraid that she’d push him away, and part of her was yelling to do just that, but pushing him away wasn't going to do either of them any good. Having him around, though...she liked who she was, and what she meant to this show, with his support.

Everything was going to change, whether she liked it or not, so she might as well change too. She might as well let him hold her while she watched Grace finish her pas de deux, and let him dry her tears when she watched the little girl she’d raised shine onstage.

This night had been eight years in the making. Maybe the only thing that had truly changed was that she wasn't facing it alone. She turned and kissed the cheek that had been resting against her temple, not missing the way he relaxed into her after feeling her lips brush against his cheek.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“It is good,” he agreed.

***  
By the time the final bows took place and the heavy curtain dropped, Laura was backstage in the kids’ dressing room with the other dance mothers, packing up Grace’s bag for the night. In just a few minutes, the children would come pouring in, hyped up on adrenalin and whatever sugary snacks their parents had given them to get them through opening night.

Laura already had Grace’s spare tights and change of clothes wedged into her bag and was waiting for Grace to reappear so that she could pack her false eyelashes in her makeup case and tuck it into the bag for tomorrow’s performance.

She could hear the rustle of bodies and the dissonant chorus of excited voices carrying down the hallway. Any second now, kids would come pouring into the dressing room, needing to be unpinned and unzipped from heavy costumes. Waiting for tender hands to wipe away pancake makeup and eyeliner and brush out half a can of hairspray from ringlets. 

Before the kids could burst through the door, Bill came in, surveying the room and the surprised mothers until he found her. “Come on,” he said, reaching his hand to her. 

“Why? Is something wrong?” Her breath caught, and for a second, she was rooted to the spot, ghosts of Christmases past catching up to her. 

“Yes,” he said. When she didn't meet him halfway, he trudged into the dressing room and laced his fingers through hers. “You’re not where you need to be.”

The sharp knife of fear that was digging into her ribs eased a bit as she saw Grace moving in a sea of people down the hallway, chattering excitedly away at her castmates. “Bill,” she said as she pulled her hand from his, “I have to help her change out of her costume.”

“She’ll be fine for a little bit.” Before she could take another step back to the dressing room, he’d caught her waist in in his arm and pulled her back toward the stage. “Just trust me, ok?”

If they were going to be an _us,_ she had to trust him, so she let him drag her along with him even as she cast a longing glance back at the girl who, in the excitement of her debut professional performance, hadn’t even noticed her.

The stage was still packed when Bill and Laura arrived, corps dancers and soloists and principals all hugging each other, then hugging Cottle, then tugging at tutus that were wedged in uncomfortable places before flopping down on the boards to tug knots loose in pointe shoes or loosening and yanking sweat-soaked tunics over their heads. Jack was holding court over all of them, accepting praise and thanks and congratulations. 

“Bill,” she said, pulling at his arm until he ducked his head down, her lips brushing his ear, “this is their night. Why are we here?”

“This is our night too,” he whispered. The arm that was wrapped around her waist let go long enough for his hands to find purchase on her shoulders. Bill turned her to the corps dancers, laughing and cheering in a bright, pastel clump in their tutus. “See?” With a gentle push, he propelled her forward into their little group, and they threw their arms around her and peppered her with hugs and kisses and thanks for her hard work and tireless coaching.

“You did so well tonight,” she said to the girls, over and over, even though she’d barely paid attention to them. “We hit our entrance perfectly,” Margaret shrieked, “thanks to you!”

She didn’t deserve their thanks. Her focus had been on Grace for the entire performance, but seeing their delighted smiles and listening to them recount every moment of the ballet, she realized that she should have been there for them. They needed her just as much as Grace did, and in two years’ time, they’d still be there, needing her in a way Grace wouldn’t. 

God, she hoped that was true. Someone pressed a plastic flute into her hand just in time for Jack to propose a toast to the future of the Pennsylvania Ballet, and her eyes met Bill’s as dancers, staff and stagehands alike raised their glasses in a toast to opening night. “Tonight was a testament to all of us,” Jack said. 

_Us._

Us wasn’t just her and Grace in that big house, or Bill overstaying his welcome until she shoved him out the door, claiming a need for sleep as a desperate excuse to keep her from asking him to spend the night. _Us_ was a stage full of dancers, some she’d known for years; others she’d coached through their first big performance. _Us_ was a family, bigger than the one she’d lost, but just as loved and needed in its own loud, dysfunctional way. 

“To us,” she whispered over the toasts and giggles of her corps dancers, raising her glass to the man who stood back and let her take center stage with her girls. He raised his own in a salute and whispered his own toast, one she couldn’t make out over the din of the celebrating cast of the Pennsylvania Ballet, but one she’d ask him to repeat. Tonight, when they were both tucked into the bed she was going to ask him to share, tonight and every night after. Where they belonged.

**Epilogue**

December 23, 2017

Even after a little more than a year as a full-fledged member of the artistic staff, Laura Roslin was still unsettled by sitting in the audience, watching as a performance unfolded on the stage in front of her. She had loved being on the stage, and loved again being in the wings watching as Grace grew as an artist, but being in the audience - part of the show, but not _really_ \- she was still getting used to it.

Not that she didn’t love it as well. There was something powerful and beautiful in being part of this collective unit of bodies that breathed with every step the dancers took. It was just...an adjustment. Another in a long series of adjustments over the last year.

The rest of the audience might not ever care about Laura Roslin, listed halfway down the page as assistant ballet master in their programs, but the dancers did. At the close of every show this season, she’d come into the small office she shared with two other adjunct artistic staff members to find a giant bouquet of roses left by her corps dancers - no doubt egged on by Bill Adama - on her desk. 

And in October, a smaller one, left by a very grateful Sharon Agathon after Laura had coached her through _Giselle,_ the petals still drying between the pages of a book in what used to be her father’s study. She treasured it as much as she treasured Grace’s first pair of pointe shoes, and the six journals that Sandra had left, written in purple ink and dotted with hearts and smiley faces. And the box of recipes that sat out on the kitchen counter, waiting for her to dig into the section marked _Christmas Dinner_ tomorrow.

Tonight, Grace was at home, too weary from her own winter performances at the JKO School to sit in the audience and watch yet another _Nutrcracker._ She’d be asleep long before Bill and Laura came home, giving them plenty of time to leave out items from a Santa Claus for a Grace who no longer believed, as well as a Lee and Zak who would be arriving past noon, but would no doubt be delighted that Santa came to visit them both at _home_ home and at Dad's home.

“I think this is the best _Nutcracker_ we’ve ever done,” came a deep voice husking in her ear she applauded the end of the first act.

“You don’t wish we were out there, taking our bows?”

Bill laughed, his arm snaking across her shoulders and pulling her close to him. “Do you really think anyone in the great state of Pennsylvania wants to see me in tights?”

She shrugged, then snuggled into the space between his shoulder and his chin, perfectly happy to leave the tulle, makeup and stage lights of her past behind to sit in the audience with the man she loved. “I think at least one person in the great state of Pennsylvania wouldn’t say no to that.”

“Well, Miss Roslin, maybe you should teach company class on Monday morning and see what happens.”

Laura Roslin laughed. Maybe, come Monday morning, she would.


End file.
